Question

This looks really simple and I can’t believe I haven’t found a solution myself. I have a bean named PersonBean, which has a name. Now I want to write a finder method that takes a string and looks for people with that string in their name, case-insensitively. Here is my current EJB QL:

SELECT OBJECT(p)
FROM Person p
WHERE (p.name LIKE ?1)

I have 2 problems with this:

1. I want the search to be case-insensitive (the above is case-sensitive) and I can’t find something like lower() or upper() in EJB QL. What can I do to have that behavior? UPDATE: I’m using J2EE version 1.4 and glassfish version 2.1, if that matters.
2. I have to pass an ugly string to the method, i.e findByString("%john%"). Is there a way to write the EJB QL so that I can pass something like findByString("john")?

Answer 1

Regarding your second question, there is a CONCAT function in EJB QL 2.1, so I think the following should work:

WHERE (p.name LIKE CONCAT(‘%’, CONCAT(?1, ‘%’)))

Edit: The above does not work because the ql grammer only allows literal strings and input parameters in a LIKE expression, which is really limiting. It should be possible to achive the same effect by using the LOCATE function like this:

WHERE LOCATE(p.name, ?1) <> 0