Question

I am wondering how to query the database using the model in play 2.0 with a query like the one I listed below. I didn’t see an option to pass in direct sql into the play framework 2.0.

I am trying to get a list of the expenses from a particular month.

SELECT * FROM Expensesdb.expense
WHERE month(expense.purchase_date) = 01

The option I see is to query for all the expenses and then parse each one for the month they are listed using the Date object.

I think there should be an efficient way, I can’t seem to find a way to do this using ebean with Java play framework 2.0 to perform this query.

Update

Thanks Nico, I tried the exact code you have, with DateTime and I tried to use the code below, it doesn’t return any Expenses. Am I doing something wrong?

    Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
    calendar.set(2012, 0, 01);

    Date startDate = calendar.getTime();
    calendar.set(2012, 0, calendar.getActualMaximum(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH));

    Date endDate = calendar.getTime();
    List<Expense> expenses = find.where().between("purchaseDate", startDate, endDate).findList();
    return expenses;

Answer 1

I see two options:

1 – Using Ebean mapping

The idea is to search the expenses between the beginning and the end of the month, something like:

Datetime firstDayOfMonth= new Datetime().withDayOfMonth(1);
Datetime lastDayOfMonth = new Datetime().dayOfMonth().withMaximumValue();
return finder.where()
    .between("purchaseDate", firstDayOfMonth, lastDayOfMonth).findList();

2 – Using RawSQL

For this, please take a look at the Ebean documentation.

The main drawback of raw sql is that this code will not be portable for different SQL servers (if you don’t plan to use several db engine, it will not matter).