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Advanced Queries

    Contents
  1. The query mechanism
  2. Criteria
    1. Predefined Criteria
    2. Agent Criteria
  3. Creating criteria objects
    1. Combining criteria

The query mechanism

As you already know from Basic Operations, queries to a database are done by creating a PS_QUERY[G] object and executing it against a PS_TRANSACTION or PS_REPOSITORY. The actual value of the generic parameter G determines the type of the objects that will be returned. By default objects of a subtype of G will also be included in the result set.

ABEL will by default load an object completely, meaning all objects that can be reached by following references will be loaded as well (see also Dealing with References).

Criteria

You can filter your query results by setting criteria in the query object, using feature set_criterion in PS_QUERY. There are two types of criteria: predefined and agent criteria.

Predefined Criteria

When using a predefined criterion you pick an attribute name, an operator and a value. During a read operation, ABEL checks the attribute value of the freshly retrieved object against the value set in the criterion, and filters away objects that don't satisfy the criterion.

Most of the supported operators are pretty self-describing (see class PS_CRITERION_FACTORY below). An exception could be the like operator, which does pattern-matching on strings. You can provide the like operator with a pattern as a value. The pattern can contain the wildcard characters * and ?. The asterisk stands for any number (including zero) of undefined characters, and the question mark means exactly one undefined character.

You can only use attributes that are strings or numbers, but not every type of attribute supports every other operator. Valid combinations for each type are:

  • Strings: =, like
  • Any numeric value: =, <, <=, >, >=
  • Booleans: =

Note that for performance reasons it is usually better to use predefined criteria, because they can be compiled to SQL and hence the result can be filtered in the database.

Agent Criteria

An agent criterion will filter the objects according to the result of an agent applied to them.

The criterion is initialized with an agent of type PREDICATE [TUPLE [ANY]]. There should be either an open target or a single open argument, and the type of the objects in the query result should conform to the agent's open operand.

Creating criteria objects

The criteria instances are best created using the PS_CRITERION_FACTORY class.

The main features of the class are the following:

class PS_CRITERION_FACTORY create default_create feature -- Creating a criterion new_criterion alias "()" (tuple: TUPLE [ANY]): PS_CRITERION -- Creates a new criterion according to a `tuple' -- containing either a single PREDICATE or three -- values of type [STRING, STRING, ANY]. new_agent (a_predicate: PREDICATE [TUPLE [ANY]]): PS_CRITERION -- Creates an agent criterion. new_predefined (object_attribute: STRING; operator: STRING; value: ANY): PS_CRITERION -- Creates a predefined criterion. feature -- Operators equals: STRING = "=" greater: STRING = ">" greater_equal: STRING = ">=" less: STRING = "<" less_equal: STRING = "<=" like_string: STRING = "like" end

Assuming you have an object factory: PS_CRITERION_FACTORY, to create a new criterion you have two possibilities:

  • The "traditional" way
    • factory.new_agent (agent an_agent)
    • factory.new_predefined (an_attr_name, an_operator, a_val)
  • The "syntactic sugar" way
    • factory (an_attr_name, an_operator, a_value)
    • factory (agent an_agent) 
	create_criteria_traditional : PS_CRITERION
		-- Create a new criteria using the traditional approach.
		do
			-- for predefined criteria
			Result:= factory.new_predefined ("age", factory.less, 5)

			-- for agent criteria
			Result := factory.new_agent (agent age_more_than (?, 5))
		end

	create_criteria_parenthesis : PS_CRITERION
		-- Create a new criteria using parenthesis alias.
		do
			-- for predefined criteria
			Result:= factory ("age", factory.less, 5)

			-- for agent criteria
			Result := factory (agent age_more_than (?, 5))
		end			

	age_more_than (person: PERSON; age: INTEGER): BOOLEAN
		-- An example agent
		do
			Result:= person.age > age
		end




Combining criteria


You can combine multiple criterion objects by using the standard Eiffel logical operators. For example, if you want to search for a person called "Albo Bitossi" with age <= 20, you can just create a criterion object for each of the constraints and combine them:  


	composite_search_criterion : PS_CRITERION
		-- Combining criterion objects.
		local
			first_name_criterion: PS_CRITERION
			last_name_criterion: PS_CRITERION
			age_criterion: PS_CRITERION
		do
			first_name_criterion:= factory ("first_name", factory.equals, "Albo")

			last_name_criterion := factory ("last_name", factory.equals, "Bitossi")

			age_criterion := factory (agent age_more_than (?, 20))
			
			Result := first_name_criterion and last_name_criterion and not age_criterion

			-- Shorter version: 
			Result := factory ("first_name", "=", "Albo") 
				and factory ("last_name", "=", "Bitossi") 
				and not factory (agent age_more_than (?, 20))
		end


ABEL supports the three standard logical operators and, or and not. The precedence rules are the same as in Eiffel, which means that not is stronger than and, which in turn is stronger than or.




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