Case-insensitive search using Hibernate - sql

Question

I'm using Hibernate for ORM of my Java app to an Oracle database (not that the database vendor matters, we may switch to another database one day), and I want to retrieve objects from the database according to user-provided strings. For example, when searching for people, if the user is looking for people who live in 'fran', I want to be able to give her people in San Francisco.
SQL is not my strong suit, and I prefer Hibernate's Criteria building code to hard-coded strings as it is. Can anyone point me in the right direction about how to do this in code, and if impossible, how the hard-coded SQL should look like?
Thanks,
Yuval =8-)

Answer 1

For the simple case you describe, look at Restrictions.ilike(), which does a case-insensitive search.
Criteria crit = session.createCriteria(Person.class);
crit.add(Restrictions.ilike('town', '%fran%');
List results = crit.list();

Answer 2

Criteria crit = session.createCriteria(Person.class);
crit.add(Restrictions.ilike('town', 'fran', MatchMode.ANYWHERE);
List results = crit.list();

Answer 3

If you use Spring's HibernateTemplate to interact with Hibernate, here is how you would do a case insensitive search on a user's email address:
getHibernateTemplate().find("from User where upper(email)=?", emailAddr.toUpperCase());

Answer 4

You also do not have to put in the '%' wildcards. You can pass MatchMode (docs for previous releases here) in to tell the search how to behave. START, ANYWHERE, EXACT, and END matches are the options.

Answer 5

The usual approach to ignoring case is to convert both the database values and the input value to upper or lower case - the resultant sql would have something like
select f.name from f where TO_UPPER(f.name) like '%FRAN%'
In hibernate criteria restrictions.like(...).ignoreCase()
I'm more familiar with Nhibernate so the syntax might not be 100% accurate
for some more info see pro hibernate 3 extract and hibernate docs 15.2. Narrowing the result set

Answer 6

This can also be done using the criterion Example, in the org.hibernate.criterion package.
public List findLike(Object entity, MatchMode matchMode) {
Example example = Example.create(entity);
example.enableLike(matchMode);
example.ignoreCase();
return getSession().createCriteria(entity.getClass()).add(
example).list();
}
Just another way that I find useful to accomplish the above.

Answer 7

Since Hibernate 5.2 session.createCriteria is deprecated. Below is solution using JPA 2 CriteriaBuilder. It uses like and upper:
CriteriaBuilder builder = session.getCriteriaBuilder();
CriteriaQuery<Person> criteria = builder.createQuery(Person.class);
Root<Person> root = criteria.from(Person.class);
Expression<String> upper = builder.upper(root.get("town"));
criteria.where(builder.like(upper, "%FRAN%"));
session.createQuery(criteria.select(root)).getResultList();

Answer 8

Most default database collations are not case-sensitive, but in the SQL Server world it can be set at the instance, the database, and the column level.

Answer 9

You could look at using Compass a wrapper above lucene.
http://www.compass-project.org/
By adding a few annotations to your domain objects you get achieve this kind of thing.
Compass provides a simple API for working with Lucene. If you know how to use an ORM, then you will feel right at home with Compass with simple operations for save, and delete & query.
From the site itself.
"Building on top of Lucene, Compass simplifies common usage patterns of Lucene such as google-style search, index updates as well as more advanced concepts such as caching and index sharding (sub indexes). Compass also uses built in optimizations for concurrent commits and merges."
I have used this in the past and I find it great.