How to use MatchMode in your JPA/Hibernate Restrictions & Criteria queries

Back in July I blogged about how to do AND/OR type SQL queries using Hibernate AND/OR JPA using disjunctions. If you looked at the example code you will have seen that I was appending "%" as the wildcard operator in my Restrictions.

Since then I've used Restrictions a couple more times and wondered if there was a better way of specifying them other than string concatenation.

Well there is and it's with the use of the MatchMode class.

Rather than this code:

import org.hibernate.Criteria;
import org.hibernate.Session;
import org.hibernate.criterion.Restrictions;
 
Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Product.class);
criteria.add(
  Restrictions.disjunction()
    .add(Restrictions.ilike("code", codeOrName + "%"))
    .add(Restrictions.ilike("name", "%" + codeOrName + "%"))
);
return criteria.list();

You can now write:

import org.hibernate.Criteria;
import org.hibernate.Session;
import org.hibernate.criterion.Restrictions;
 
Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Product.class);
criteria.add(
  Restrictions.disjunction()
    .add(Restrictions.ilike("code", codeOrName, MatchMode.START))
    .add(Restrictions.ilike("name", codeOrName, MatchMode.ANYWHERE))
);
return criteria.list();