Deprecation of Hibernate Criteria and how we can still prevent it

Hibernate ORM
23

We just finished migrating a large project from Hibernate Criteria to JPA Criteria.

With a simple wrapper around the API and a lot of delegate methods and helpers, the migration is straight forward and LOC stayed nearly the same. E.g:

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The code is typesafe and easier to read and understand in many cases.

We ran into four main issues:

  1. sqlRestriction
    As mentioned above, support is missing but we were able to replace all usages with built-in or custom function calls

  2. Custom Types
    We are unable to query custom types such as org.joda.money.Money directly. Hibernate criteria allowed us to write something like Restrictions.eq("price", new Money(EUR, 10). This fails with a NPE when using JPA criteria, but might be an issue in the Jadira UserType library. We have to investigate further.

  3. @AnyType
    This was the most annoying problem. We are using Hibernate’s @AnyType in a couple of entities. JPA Criteria does not support this type at all. It is not included in the metamodel and cannot be used in queries. Since @AnyType is not deprecated, I would expect support for it in HQL and criteria queries.
    For now, we worked around it by adding two virtual columns for each such type. E.g.

	@Any(metaDef = "likeable", metaColumn = @Column(name = "target_type"), optional = false, fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
	@JoinColumn(name = "target_id", nullable = false, updatable = false)
	private Likeable target;

	@Column(name = "target_id", insertable = false, updatable = false, nullable = false)
	private Long targetId;
	@Column(name = "target_type", insertable = false, updatable = false, nullable = false)
	private String targetType;
  1. AttributeConverter
    This is an issue with the metamodel rather than JPA criteria. Types that convert from basic values to collections using @Convert are not recognized by the metamodel. There is an open ticket for this: https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-11803.
	@Convert(converter = StringToListConverter.class)
	private List<String> groups;

    org.hibernate.metamodel.internal.MetadataContext - HHH015007: Illegal argument on static metamodel field injection : Community_#groups; expected type :  org.hibernate.metamodel.model.domain.internal.SingularAttributeImpl; encountered type : javax.persistence.metamodel.ListAttribute

Are there any plans to support @Convert and @AnyType in JPA criteria?

Thomas