Java Persistence with Hibernate

15.1. Querying with criteria and example

The Criteria and Example APIs are available in Hibernate only; Java Persistence doesn't standardize these interfaces. As mentioned earlier, it seems likely that other vendors, not only Hibernate, support a similar extension interface and that a future version of the standard will include this functionality.

Querying with programmatically generated criteria and example objects is often the preferred solution when queries get more complex. This is especially true if you have to create a query at runtime. Imagine that you have to implement a search mask in your application, with many check boxes, input fields, and switches the user can enable. You must create a database query from the user's selection. The ...