Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook

3.3. Better Ways to Build Queries

As mentioned earlier, HQL lets you go beyond the use of JDBC-style query placeholders to get parameters conveniently into your queries. The features discussed in this section can make your programs much easier to read and maintain.

Use named parameters to control queries and move the query text completely outside of your Java source code.

3.3.1. Why do I care?

Well, I've already promised that this will make your programs easier to write, read, and update. In fact, if these features weren't available in Hibernate, I would have been less eager to adopt it, because they've been part of my own (even more) lightweight O/R layer for years.

Named parameters make code easier to understand because the purpose of the parameter is clear both within the query itself and within the Java code that is setting it up. This self-documenting nature is valuable in itself, but it also reduces the potential for error by freeing you from counting commas and question marks, and it can modestly improve efficiency by letting you use the same parameter more than once in a single query.

Keeping the queries out of Java source code makes them much easier to read and edit because they aren't giant concatenated series of Java strings spread across multiple lines and interleaved with extraneous quotation marks, backslashes, and other Java punctuation. Typing them the first time is bad enough, but if you've ever had to perform significant surgery on a query embedded in a program in this ...