Retrieving all rows of a table without HQL?

Question

I am using Hibernate 4 and would like to simply list all rows of a table. All solutions I found suggest using something like "from tablename", but I would like to avoid hardcoding tablenames in strings.

Answer 1

You can use

session.createCriteria(MyEntity.class).list();

for example.

Answer 2

HQL doesn't use table names. It uses entity names. And entity names are (by default) class names. So you can use

String hql = "select a from " + TheEntity.class.getSimpleName() + " a";

But I would favor readability over type safety here, and use

String hql = "select a from TheEntity a";

You should have automated tests for your queries anyway.