How to bulk delete from element collection in jpa

Question

I'm using jpa 2.0 and I have the following entity:

@Entity
public class Folder{

    @ElementCollection
    @CollectionTable(name="folder_files")
    private Set<String> files;      
    // .....
 }

Given a file name, I would like to delete all entries where files == theGivenFileName. In sql it would be something like this:

Delete from folder_files where files = XXX

Is there a way to perform this query using criteria-api? If not, is there a way to perform this query using jpql?

UPDATE: I think my question was not clear enough: Since jpql uses entities (and not tables) I cannot just perform the sql written above plus since I'm using @ElementCollection I don't know how to address this variablr or even deal with it. I would like to delete all entries in that collection (in my case, the files set) which holds a given value, from all entities. Is that possible using jpql or (even better) criteria-api?

Answer 1

The Delete FROM clause requires an Entity, so there is no way to delete from an element collection from what I understand.

You can use a native SQL query, or you can map the element collection as a OneToMany to an Entity instead.