HQL Join - Path expected for join! hibernate

Question

I am new to hibernate and I met a following problem: I got "Path expected for join!" exception when I tried to run this query:

String hql = "select avg(t.price) from Ticket t JOIN Flight f WHERE f.number = '" + flightNumber + "'";
Query query = this.session.createQuery(hql);        
List<Double> list = query.list();

I wanted to select average price of tickets that have been sold for a given flight.

I have checked these links, but I did not solve my problem: HQL left join: Path expected for join hql inner join Path expected for join! error

My code is:

Flight.hbm.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping PUBLIC
 "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD 3.0//EN"
 "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping-3.0.dtd">
<hibernate-mapping>
    <class name="pck.Flight" table="flight" catalog="airbook">
        <id name="id" type="java.lang.Integer">
            <column name="id" />
            <generator class="identity" />
        </id>
        <many-to-one name="sourceairport" class="pck.Sourceairport" fetch="select">
            <column name="sourceairportid" />
        </many-to-one>
        <many-to-one name="destinationairport" class="pck.Destinationairport" fetch="select">
            <column name="destinationairportid" />
        </many-to-one>
        <property name="number" type="string">
            <column name="number" length="30" />
        </property>
        <property name="date" type="timestamp">
            <column name="date" length="19" />
        </property>
        <property name="miles" type="java.lang.Integer">
            <column name="miles" />
        </property>
        <property name="numberofseats" type="java.lang.Integer">
            <column name="numberofseats" />
        </property>
        <property name="airplane" type="string">
            <column name="airplane" length="30" />
        </property>
        <set name="tickets" table="ticket" inverse="true" lazy="true" fetch="select">
            <key>
                <column name="flightid" />
            </key>
            <one-to-many class="pck.Ticket" />
        </set>
    </class> </hibernate-mapping>

Ticket.hbm.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping PUBLIC "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD 3.0//EN"
 "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping-3.0.dtd">
<hibernate-mapping>
    <class name="pck.Ticket" table="ticket" catalog="airbook">
        <id name="id" type="java.lang.Integer">
            <column name="id" />
            <generator class="identity" />
        </id>
        <many-to-one name="flight" class="pck.Flight" fetch="select">
            <column name="flightid" />
        </many-to-one>
        <many-to-one name="passenger" class="pck.Passenger" fetch="select">
            <column name="passengerid" />
        </many-to-one>
        <property name="price" type="java.lang.Double">
            <column name="price" precision="22" scale="0" />
        </property>
    </class>
</hibernate-mapping>

All the other queries without JOIN work fine. I do not know where the problem is.

---

The correct query is:

select avg(t.price) from Ticket t join t.flight f where f.number = :flightNumber

And altogether with query execution:

Transaction tx = session.beginTransaction(); 
String hql = "select avg(t.price) from Ticket t join t.flight f where f.number = :flightNumber";
Query query = this.session.createQuery(hql).setString("flightNumber", flightNumber); 
List<Double> list = query.list();  
tx.commit();

Answer 1

As explained in the question you linked to, and in the Hibernate documentation, joins use associations between entities. So the correct query is

select avg(t.price) from Ticket t join t.flight f where f.number = :flightNumber

Also note that using parameters is a much better solution than concatenating values directly in the query. It handles quoting and escaping automatically, and doesn't have any risk of HQL injection.