Java EE 8 Application Development

The Criteria API

One of the main additions to JPA in the 2.0 specification was the introduction of the Criteria API. The Criteria API is meant as a complement to JPQL.

Although JPQL is very flexible, it has some problems that make working with it more difficult than necessary. For starters, JPQL queries are stored as strings, and the compiler has no way of validating the JPQL syntax. Additionally, JPQL is not type-safe: we could write a JPQL query in which our where clause could have a string value for a numeric property and our code would compile and deploy just fine.

To get around the JPQL limitations described in the previous paragraph, the Criteria API was introduced to JPA in version 2.0 of the specification. The Criteria API allows ...