Dynamic SQL

One of the most powerful features of MyBatis has always been its Dynamic SQL capabilities. If you have any experience with JDBC or any similar framework, you understand how painful it is to conditionally concatenate strings of SQL together, making sure not to forget spaces or to omit a comma at the end of a list of columns. Dynamic SQL can be downright painful to deal with.

While working with Dynamic SQL will never be a party, MyBatis certainly improves the situation with a powerful Dynamic SQL language that can be used within any mapped SQL statement.

The Dynamic SQL elements should be familiar to anyone who has used JSTL or any similar XML based text processors. In previous versions of MyBatis, there were a lot of elements to know and understand. MyBatis 3 greatly improves upon this, and now there are less than half of those elements to work with. MyBatis employs powerful OGNL based expressions to eliminate most of the other elements:

• if
• choose (when, otherwise)
• trim (where, set)
• foreach