An identification variable is a valid identifier declared in the
FROM clause of a query.
Requirements:
- All identification variables must be declared in the FROM clause. Identification variables cannot be declared in other clauses.
- An identification variable must not be a reserved identifier or have the same name as any entity in the same persistence unit.
- Identification variables are case insensitive.
- An identification variable evaluates to a value of the type of the expression used in declaring the variable.
An identification variable can range over an entity, embeddable, or basic abstract schema type. An identification variable designates an instance of an abstract schema type or an element of a collection of abstract schema type instances.
Note that for identification variables referring to an instance of an association or collection represented as a {@link java.util.Map}, the identification variable is of the abstract schema type of the map value.
An identification variable always designates a reference to a single value. It is declared in one of three ways:
- In a range variable declaration;
- In a join clause;
- In a collection member declaration.
The identification variable declarations are evaluated from left to right in the
FROM clause, and an identification variable declaration can use the result of a preceding identification variable declaration of the query string.
All identification variables used in the SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY, GROUP BY, or HAVING clause of a SELECT or DELETE statement must be declared in the FROM clause. The identification variables used in the WHERE clause of an UPDATE statement must be declared in the UPDATE clause.
An identification variable is scoped to the query (or subquery) in which it is defined and is also visible to any subqueries within that query scope that do not define an identification variable of the same name.
@version 2.4
@since 2.3
@author Pascal Filion