Question

What is the right way do validate a jpa query programmatically. Hibernate validates all annotation based named queries on entities. But how can I call this validation routine on programmatically builded jpa queries, to check for errors?

@Entity
public class Foo {
@Id
public int id;

public String name;

}

main(...) {
    Query q = getEntityManager().createQuery("select e from " + Foo.class.getName() + " e where e.name = 'x' ");
    // validate q here
}

Answer 1

Don’t. Integration test the hell out of your code, using a real database with the same schema as your production environment.

Think about it: if you create a malformed query, that’s a programming bug. What are you going to do with the information? Tell the user that a JPA query is malformed? All you can realistically do is log the error and tell the user “something bad happened”. You’ll know it’s a malformed query when you check the logs later anyway…

Edit

It might also be worth investigating the createQuery() call by feeding it bad data – the javadoc here suggests that it can throw a HibernateException, and I’m not sure what it could do with a string other than validate it…