BadJpqlGrammarException: Line 1:236 token recognition error at: '!';

[sergey-morenets]

Hi

We tried to upgrade our Spring Boot project and used Spring Data JPA 3.1 (previously we had 3.0.x).
And we received a lot of errors in our JPQL (@query) queries, for example, if we used "!=" operator then we received the following exception trying to execute this query:

Caused by: org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.query.BadJpqlGrammarException: Line 1:236 token recognition error at: '!'; Bad JPQL grammar.

We are aware that JPA officially supports "<>" operator but "!=" also worked before 3.1.
We understood that this issue is caused by new HQL parser in Spring Data JPA however we couldn't find any information about these breaking changes in WIKI: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-data-commons/wiki/Spring-Data-2023.0-%28Ullman%29-Release-Notes

So what we suggest:

1. Add information about breaking changes in WIKI/documentation
2. Currently this error happens during query execution. But if query is invalid then this error should be fired on application startup (like any other query validation errors).

[gregturn]

The query parser was meant to seamlessly be swapped into place for Hibernate (HQL) and pure JPA (JPQL). There are no official attempts to "alter" the format of queries.

Can you post the precise query so we can build a reproducing test case and properly handle it?

[gregturn]

I can also confirm that Hibernate's own query parser has:

NOT_EQUAL : '!=' | '^=' | '<>';

[sergey-morenets]

The query parser was meant to seamlessly be swapped into place for Hibernate (HQL) and pure JPA (JPQL). There are no official attempts to "alter" the format of queries.

Can you post the precise query so we can build a reproducing test case and properly handle it?

Hi @gregturn

Thank you for the quick response. You can take any query with "!=", for example,

SELECT u FROM User u WHERE u.id != 1

[gregturn]

Heh, it's even written plain as day...and I missed it.

[gregturn]

Merged to main and backported to 3.1.x.

[gpolet]

Merged to main and backported to 3.1.x.

Looks like this one didn't make into 3.1.1

[gregturn]

Actually, it's right here:

https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-data-jpa/blob/3.1.x/spring-data-jpa/src/main/antlr4/org/springframework/data/jpa/repository/query/Hql.g4#L592

We actually have a parser for HQL (which this ticket addressed) as well as standard JPQL.