Creating a criteria

Generally, we require filtered data in a SQL query, in which we use the WHERE clause to apply a condition to the data. Apart from the WHERE clause, we can use ORDER BY to apply sorting to the data, either ascending or descending, and LIMIT (if it's MySQL) to get a limited number of rows.

Hibernate allows us to perform all the operations mentioned before in an object-oriented way. A criteria is an interface; it provides an API to perform WHERE, ORDER BY, LIMIT, result transformation, and so on.

How to do it...

Here, we will try to create a criteria for employee.

The SQL query executed to achieve the same result is as follows:

SELECT * FROM employee;

Now, let's take a look at how to do the same using hibernate.

Code

Enter the following code to create a criteria for employee:

Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Employee.class);
List<Employee> employees = criteria.list();
for(Employee employee : employees){
System.out.println(employee.toString());
}

Output

The output...