Is there a way to reduce the amount of boiler-plate code associated with a CriteriaQuery (in JPA 2.0)?

Question

I love the type safety CriteriaQuery brings ing JPA 2.0 but it also brings a bit of boiler-plate code. For example, let say I have an entity called NamedEntity, which simply has an id and a String field called "name" (assume it has the unique constraint set to true). Here's what the NamedEntityManager might look like:

public class NamedEntityManager
{
    //inject using your framework
    EntityManager entityManager;

    //retrieve all existing entities of type NamedEntity from DB
    public Iterable<NamedEntity> queryAll()
    {
        CriteriaBuilder builder = entityManager.getCriteriaBuilder();
        CriteriaQuery<NamedEntity> query = builder.createQuery(NamedEntity.class);
        return entityManager.createQuery(query).getResultList();
    }

    //retrieve a single entity of type NamedEntity from DB using specified name
    public NamedEntity queryByName(String name)
    {
        CriteriaBuilder builder = entityManager.getCriteriaBuilder();
        CriteriaQuery<NamedEntity> query = builder.createQuery(NamedEntity.class);
        Root<NamedEntity> root = query.from(NamedEntity.class);
        query = query.where(root.<NamedEntity>get("name").in(name));

        //skipped the try/catch block for the sake of brevity
        return entityManager.createQuery(query).getSingleResult();
    }
}

Is there a way to condense the code in order to avoid copying/pasting the same lines of code into each query method? Perhaps somehow reuse the CriteriaQuery object?

Answer 1

I was looking for something like that, you could take a look at Querydsl (LGPL licensed) which can have JPA as backend.

Im still reading into it, but from their examples, it looks pretty clean.

HQLQuery q = new HibernateQuery(session);
QCat cat = new QCat("cat"); // query type
List<Cat> cats = q.from(cat).where(cat.name.between("A", "B")).list(cat);

Answer 2

In JPA 2.1, it will most probably be possible to mix JPQL and Criterias. With such an approach you could define a base query with JPQL and then use the Criteria API to dynamically add small parts.

I figure the API will be less verbose then, since you only need to use small parts of it.