Question

This one has me stumped and thought I would pose it to the SO community for help.

A user wants to select all orders that start with a certain ID, example:

123 would return 123, 12345, 1238790, etc. ID is an int column however.

I’m using nHibernate and my line currently is:

criteria.Add(Restrictions.Eq("Id", itemId));

but that’s only going to return me 123. I can do a Restrictions.Like, but that converts to a SQL LIKE clause and that won’t work on an int col.

Any ideas?

EDIT: Sorry, the DB is SQL Server 2008

Answer 1

Unfortunately, you didn’t specify what database you’re using (SQL is just the query language….), but if you’re on SQL Server (the Microsoft RDBMS product), then you could create a computed column of type VARCHAR(15) to hold a string representation of your INT, and then just search on that….

ALTER TABLE dbo.YourTable
   ADD IdAsString AS CAST(Id AS VARCHAR(15)) PERSISTED    -- PERSISTED might not work - depending on your version of SQL Server

SELECT (list of columns)
FROM dbo.YourTable
WHERE IdAsString LIKE '123%'

Whether that really makes business sense, is a totally different story….. (I agree with Oded and Matt Ball…)

But since that’s a string column now, you should be able to use your Restrictions.Like approach in NHibernate as you mention.