EntityQuery and ordering issue

05. Oct 2008, 14:03 CET | Link Jarek Gilewski

Hello,

I have two entities, payment and its items (simple one-to-many relation):

@Entity
@Table(name = "payment")
public class Payment {	/** Identifier attribute (primary-key). */
	.
	.
	.
	@Column(name = "name", unique = true)
	@NotEmpty
	@Length(max = 30)
	private String name;

	@OneToMany(mappedBy = "payment", fetch=FetchType.LAZY,
			cascade = {CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.MERGE, CascadeType.REMOVE})
	private List<PaymentItem> paymentItems = new ArrayList<PaymentItem>();
	.
	.
	.
}

and

@Entity
@Table(name = "payment_item")
public PaymentItem {
	.
	.
	.
	@ManyToOne
	@JoinColumn(name="payment_id")
	@NotNull	
	private Payment payment;

	@Column(name = "amount")
	@NotNull
	@Digits(integerDigits=11, fractionalDigits=2)
	private BigDecimal amount;
	.
	.
	.
}

For listing payment items i have created the class:

@Name("paymentItemList")
public class PaymentItemList extends EntityQuery<PaymentItem> {

	@Override
	// becouse validate() is with @Create annotation i override it to initialize the object
	public void validate() {
		super.validate();
		
		setOrderColumn("payment.name");
		setOrderDirection("asc");
		setMaxResults(20);
	}

	@Override
	public String getEjbql() {
		return "select pi from PaymentItem pi";
	}

}

The problem is that I cannot order the items by payment.name column. I got the error:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: invalid order column
	at org.jboss.seam.framework.Query.sanitizeOrderColumn(Query.java:445)
	at org.jboss.seam.framework.Query.setOrderColumn(Query.java:436)

I can see at Query.java that the column name is checked with pattern "\\w*$" (ORDER_COLUMN_PATTERN) wich i guess don't allowe the dot in the order column name.

I check that "select pi from PaymentItems pi order by payment.name" is working OK.

Can we chcenge the ORDER_COLUMN_PATTERN to allow ordering by related columns?

Regards

Jarek