Using hibernate criteria, is there a way to escape special characters?

LikeExpression's constructors are all protected, so it's not a viable option. Also, it has problems of its own.

A colleague and I created a patch which works pretty well. The gist of the patch is that for the LikeExpression constructor which consumes a MatchMode, we escape the special characters. For the constructor which consumes a Character (the escape character), we assume the user escapes the special characters on their own.

We also parameterized the escape character to ensure that it can't corrupt the SQL query if they use something like \ or a quote character.

package org.hibernate.criterion;

import org.hibernate.Criteria;
import org.hibernate.HibernateException;
import org.hibernate.dialect.Dialect;
import org.hibernate.engine.TypedValue;

public class LikeExpression implements Criterion {
    private final String propertyName;
    private final String value;
    private final Character escapeChar;

    protected LikeExpression(
            String propertyName,
            Object value) {
        this(propertyName, value.toString(), (Character) null);
    }

    protected LikeExpression(
            String propertyName,
            String value,
            MatchMode matchMode) {
        this( propertyName, matchMode.toMatchString( value
                .toString()
                .replaceAll("!", "!!")
                .replaceAll("%", "!%")
                .replaceAll("_", "!_")), '!' );
    }

    protected LikeExpression(
            String propertyName,
            String value,
            Character escapeChar) {
        this.propertyName = propertyName;
        this.value = value;
        this.escapeChar = escapeChar;
    }

    public String toSqlString(
            Criteria criteria,
            CriteriaQuery criteriaQuery) throws HibernateException {
        Dialect dialect = criteriaQuery.getFactory().getDialect();
        String[] columns = criteriaQuery.getColumnsUsingProjection( criteria, propertyName );
        if ( columns.length != 1 ) {
            throw new HibernateException( "Like may only be used with single-column properties" );
        }
        String lhs = lhs(dialect, columns[0]);
        return lhs + " like ?" + ( escapeChar == null ? "" : " escape ?" );

    }

    public TypedValue[] getTypedValues(
            Criteria criteria,
            CriteriaQuery criteriaQuery) throws HibernateException {
        return new TypedValue[] {
                criteriaQuery.getTypedValue( criteria, propertyName, typedValue(value) ),
                criteriaQuery.getTypedValue( criteria, propertyName, escapeChar.toString() )
        };
    }

    protected String lhs(Dialect dialect, String column) {
        return column;
    }

    protected String typedValue(String value) {
        return value;
    }

}

If you're wondering what the lhs and typedValue methods are for, the new IlikeExpression should answer those questions.

package org.hibernate.criterion;

import org.hibernate.dialect.Dialect;

public class IlikeExpression extends LikeExpression {

    protected IlikeExpression(
            String propertyName,
            Object value) {
        super(propertyName, value);
    }

    protected IlikeExpression(
            String propertyName,
            String value,
            MatchMode matchMode) {
        super(propertyName, value, matchMode);

    }

    protected IlikeExpression(
            String propertyName,
            String value,
            Character escapeChar) {
        super(propertyName, value, escapeChar);
    }

    @Override
    protected String lhs(Dialect dialect, String column) {
        return dialect.getLowercaseFunction() + '(' + column + ')';
    }

    @Override
    protected String typedValue(String value) {
        return super.typedValue(value).toLowerCase();
    }

}

After this, the only thing left is to make Restrictions use these new classes:

public static Criterion like(String propertyName, Object value) {
    return new LikeExpression(propertyName, value);
}

public static Criterion like(String propertyName, String value, MatchMode matchMode) {
    return new LikeExpression(propertyName, value, matchMode);
}

public static Criterion like(String propertyName, String value, Character escapeChar) {
    return new LikeExpression(propertyName, value, escapeChar);
}

public static Criterion ilike(String propertyName, Object value) {
    return new IlikeExpression(propertyName, value);
}

public static Criterion ilike(String propertyName, String value, MatchMode matchMode) {
    return new IlikeExpression(propertyName, value, matchMode);
}

public static Criterion ilike(String propertyName, String value, Character escapeChar) {
    return new IlikeExpression(propertyName, value, escapeChar);
}

Edit: Oh yeah. This works for Oracle. We're not sure about other databases though.

if you use LikeExpression directly, it enables you to specify the escape character. i assume that should be all you need.

It's not a very clean way to do it but a sqlRestrinction should be easier:

criterions.add(Restrictions.sqlRestriction(columnName+ " ilike '!%' escape '!'"));

You can even do a start with search using the same principle:

criterions.add(Restrictions.sqlRestriction(columnName+ " ilike '!%%' escape '!'"));