Question

For example if I have:

connection.prepareStatement("SELECT * FROM users 
                                   WHERE status=? AND otherAttribute=?");

Where in some cases I might want a specific status and in others I want all statuses. How can I basically do something like:

preparedStatement.setInt(1, mySpecificRequestedStatus);

and in other cases:

preparedStatement.setInt(1, allStatuses); // wildcard

So that I don’t have to have multiple PreparedStatements, especially for more complex WHERE clauses in the SELECT statements where the permutations can be higher.

Answer 1

You don’t have a choice, you have to pick one or the other as I originally suspected and asked.

You can either:

1. Create a complex prepared statement with if clauses
2. Create a complex SQL statement which doesn’t have the best performance

There really isn’t a good solution to this. This is why ORM’s exist, to abstract this out. The problem is that ORM introduce other issues/complexities in exchange for simplifying other things.