How to sort by multiple properties in Spring Data

Question

I'm looking at the examples giving on this page (http://docs.spring.io/spring-data/jpa/docs/current/reference/html/jpa.repositories.html) about method naming, is it possible to create a complex chain method name such as

findByProgrammeAndDirectorAndProgDateBetweenOrderByProgDateStartTimeAsc

In the example they give, they are only doing an OrderBy on one value. In the example above ProgDate and StartTime would be two separate values.

Answer 1

Yes it's should be possible:

Try this:

findByProgrammeAndDirectorAndProgDateBetweenOrderByProgDateStartTimeAsc(String programme, String director, Date progStart, Date progEnd);

I have not tested the code, but according to things I've already done, it should work.

Answer 2

The trick is to simply delimit the properties you want to sort by using the direction keywords Asc and Desc. So what you probably want in your query method is something like:

…OrderByProgDateAscStartTimeAsc

Note, how we conclude the first property definition by Asc and keep going with the next property.

Generally speaking, we recommend switching to @Query based queries, once method names exceed a certain length or complexity. The main reason being that it's awkward for clients to call these very long methods. With @Query you rather get the full power of the query language plus a reasonably sized method name that might be of higher level language to express the intent of the query.