This blog article is part of a “series of blog articles” about common pitfalls using JPA and ways to avoid them. In this article, we describe unexpected results of navigational JPQL queries.
Navigating a relationship in a JPQL query is mapped to an inner join in the corresponding SQL query. As a result non-related entities are not part of the query result. The following JPQL query returns the related department entities for the employees matching the where clause. In fact, only employees having a department are taken into account. So the relationship navigation defines an extra condition for the WHERE clause of the corresponding SQL query. The query result does not include any NULL values representing that an employee does not have a department:
SELECT e.department FROM Employee WHERE ...
You should use an OUTER JOIN query, if you want employees without department taken into account:
SELECT d FROM Employee e LEFT OUTER JOIN e.department d WHERE ...
Recommendation: Use a OUTER JOIN query in order to take null-valued relationships into account.
You can find an example of this pitfall and its solution in the class OuterJoinQueryExperiment in this project: https://github.com/akquinet/jpapitfalls.git.
