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specialized expression types for easier JPA Criteria#936

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gavinking merged 25 commits intojakartaee:mainfrom
gavinking:#519
Feb 20, 2026
Merged

specialized expression types for easier JPA Criteria#936
gavinking merged 25 commits intojakartaee:mainfrom
gavinking:#519

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@gavinking gavinking commented Jan 30, 2026 •
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@beikov had already done most of the hard work in #522.

This is a light reworking of that PR.

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gavinking commented Jan 30, 2026

Still need to figure out what to do about BooleanExpression vs Predicate. We didn't bother with a BooleanExpression in Data 1.1. I'm OK with leaving it in here, but if are going to have a BooleanExpression type, we don't need Predicate anymore and we can deprecate it.

@gavinking gavinking mentioned this pull request Jan 30, 2026
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@gavinking gavinking marked this pull request as ready for review January 31, 2026 09:20
@gavinking gavinking added 4.0.0 candidate-for-4 Good candidate for JPA 4 labels Jan 31, 2026
@gavinking gavinking linked an issue Jan 31, 2026 that may be closed by this pull request
Introduce specialized expression types for easier JPA Criteria querying #519
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jwgmeligmeyling approved these changes Jan 31, 2026
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All my review comments from the #522 PR are incorporated in this PR.

beikov
beikov reviewed Feb 6, 2026
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Other than the missing mod function, this looks good to me. Maybe we should add overloads for the various methods where currently Predicate is accepted to also accept BooleanExpression and change return types to return BooleanExpression? Then we can deprecate Predicate.

Comment thread api/src/main/java/jakarta/persistence/criteria/NumericExpression.java
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gavinking commented Feb 18, 2026

I have tried replacing Predicate with BooleanExpression or Expression<Boolean> in locations where that would not break backward compatibility. It's not perfect, we still have Predicate in some return types, but it's not terrible either.

jwgmeligmeyling
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Comment thread api/src/main/java/jakarta/persistence/criteria/AbstractQuery.java
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gavinking commented Feb 20, 2026

I do believe this is ready to go. In the end I did not see any way to really untangle Predicate without major breakage to existing programs. But it's fine, we can live with that.

Also I have aligned naming of numeric operations with what we have in Jakarta Data.

beikov and others added 16 commits February 20, 2026 12:03
@beikov @gavinking
[jakartaee#519] Introduce specialized expression types for easier JPA…
42d189d 
… Criteria querying
@beikov @gavinking
[jakartaee#519] Simplify handling for temporals
89c2976
@gavinking
improvements to specialized expression types
0cc799e 
- fixed NumberExpression to extend ComparableExpression
- fix up typing of methods of ComparableExpression
- fix broken overloading of CriteriaBuilder.literal()
- try to maintain some sort of distinction b/w Predicate + BooleanExpression
- move sorting methods down to ComparableExpression (debatable)
- removed unnecessary overloads of Path.get()
@gavinking
NumberExpression -> NumericExpression
6866999 
because "Number" is not an adjective
@gavinking
fix up headers
f8dbce9
@gavinking
same work for XxxxSingularAttribute
76aa7b8
@gavinking
add literal(char) because otherwise char gets coerced to int, breakin…
29c93f7 
…g code
@gavinking
TCK has test for literal(null) that still broke
6cd685c 
unfortunately overloading here just doesn't work
@gavinking
allow inter-numeric type comparisons
33273e0 
and remove redundant overrides
@gavinking
add covariant overrides
3a29434
@gavinking
add Expression.in(Subquery<T>)
2f8f716
@gavinking
fix @SInCE tags and header
240eeeb
@gavinking
Predicate -> BooleanExpression / Expression<Boolean>
6ada2f2
@gavinking
isTrue() and isFalse() are redundant in this approach
496c44c
@gavinking
go back to operator expressions returning Predicate
ca3a727
@gavinking
tiny jdoc fix
db606ea
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gavinking commented Feb 20, 2026 •
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I do believe this is ready to go.

Spoke too soon. I have made the following additional changes:

  1. Removed the unnecessary XxxxPath types which represented terminal paths. The API is nicer if we just use XxxxExpression for this.
  2. Aligned naming with Jakarta Data, so TextExpression instead of StringExpression.
  3. Aligned operations of TextExpression with Jakarta Data.
  4. Simplified naming of XxxxAttribute types, and made NumericAttribute a ComparableAttribute.
  5. Fixed a couple of generic method signatures.
  6. Changed CollectionExpression to PluralExpression so it can represent Maps.

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gavinking commented Feb 20, 2026 •
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Now I think this is ready to go. If there are further adjustments to be made, they can be done in separate pull requests. Need to (finally) get this merged so that people can experiment on the implementation side.

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gavinking commented Feb 20, 2026

Going to pull the trigger on this in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ....

@gavinking gavinking merged commit f076d77 into jakartaee:main Feb 20, 2026
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gavinking commented Feb 20, 2026

Merged. If anyone has further suggestions, send a PR or open an issue.

@gavinking gavinking removed candidate-for-4 Good candidate for JPA 4 PRIORITY labels Feb 20, 2026
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Introduce specialized expression types for easier JPA Criteria querying

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