select

The select statement is one of the most popular elements that you’ll use in MyBatis. Putting data in a database isn’t terribly valuable until you get it back out, so most applications query far more than they modify the data. For every insert, update or delete, there are probably many selects. This is one of the founding principles of MyBatis, and is the reason so much focus and effort was placed on querying and result mapping. The select element is quite simple for simple cases. For example:

<select id="selectPerson" parameterType="int" resultType="hashmap">
  SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE ID = #{id}
</select>

This statement is called selectPerson, takes a parameter of type int (or Integer), and returns a HashMap keyed by column names mapped to row values.

Notice the parameter notation:

#{id}

This tells MyBatis to create a PreparedStatement parameter. With JDBC, such a parameter would be identified by a “?” in SQL passed to a new PreparedStatement, something like this:

// Similar JDBC code, NOT MyBatis…
String selectPerson = "SELECT * FROM PERSON WHERE ID=?";
PreparedStatement ps = conn.prepareStatement(selectPerson);
ps.setInt(1,id);

Of course, there’s a lot more code required by JDBC alone to extract the results and map them to an instance of an object, which is what MyBatis saves you from having to do. There’s a lot more to know about parameter and result mapping. Those details warrant their own section, which follows later in this section.

The select element has more attributes that allow you to configure the details of how each statement should behave.

<select
  id="selectPerson"
  parameterType="int"
  parameterMap="deprecated"
  resultType="hashmap"
  resultMap="personResultMap"
  flushCache="false"
  useCache="true"
  timeout="10"
  fetchSize="256"
  statementType="PREPARED"
  resultSetType="FORWARD_ONLY">