How to select using CONTAINS instead of LIKE with JPA

Question

I'm developing small java applications to school projects with PostgreSQL.

Using the JDBC driver I could select a field using the ~ operator to act as CONTAINING instead of concatenating the filter using LIKE.

Let me give you an example:

SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE NAME ~ ? ORDER BY NAME

Since we started using the JPA framework to ease the development, I noticed that the same sample using JPA throws an error when I use the ~ operator...

Error thrown:

An exception occurred while creating a query in EntityManager: 
Exception Description: Syntax error parsing [select u from Users u where u.name ~ ?1 order by u.name]. 
[30, 41] The expression is not a valid conditional expression.

All code samples I could find on google are made using LIKE instead of CONTAINING.

My question is, does JPA support the containing operator when working with PostgreSQL?

Some info:

JDK 15
Netbeans 12.3
JPA 2.1
PostgreSQL 13.2

Answer 1

Your intuition is correct because jpa does not support the ~ operator, for further informations you can check the persistence-2_1 oracle link containing the jpa pdf specification with the list of all available jpa operators not including the ~ operator. The comparison operators available are just the following: =, >, >=, <, <=, <> (not equal), [NOT]BETWEEN, [NOT]LIKE,[NOT]IN, IS[NOT]NULL, IS[NOT]EMPTY, [NOT]MEMBER[OF], [NOT]EXISTS