Terms

A term is an expression that does not involve the value of a column. It is used:

• as an argument to some selectors, for example the indices of sub-element selectors;
• as the right operand of relations.

To create a term, call one of the factory methods in QueryBuilder:

Literals

literal() takes a Java object and inlines it as a CQL literal:

selectFrom("user").all().whereColumn("id").isEqualTo(literal(1));
// SELECT * FROM user WHERE id=1

The argument is converted according to the driver’s default type mappings. If there is no default mapping, you will get a CodecNotFoundException.

If you use custom codecs, you might need to inline a custom Java type. You can pass a CodecRegistry as the second argument (most likely, this will be the registry of your session):

MyCustomId myCustomId = ...;
CodecRegistry registry = session.getContext().getCodecRegistry();
selectFrom("user").all().whereColumn("id").isEqualTo(literal(myCustomId, registry));

Alternatively, you can pass a codec directly:

TypeCodec<MyCustomId> codec = ...;
selectFrom("user").all().whereColumn("id").isEqualTo(literal(myCustomId, codec));

Function calls

function() invokes a built-in or user-defined function. It takes a function name (optionally qualified with a keyspace), and a list of terms that will be passed as arguments:

selectFrom("sensor_data")
    .all()
    .whereColumn("id").isEqualTo(bindMarker())
    .whereColumn("date").isEqualTo(function("system", "currentDate"));
// SELECT * FROM sensor_data WHERE id=? AND date=system.currentdate()

Arithmetic operations

Terms can be combined with arithmetic operations.

selectFrom("sensor_data")
    .all()
    .whereColumn("id").isEqualTo(bindMarker())
    .whereColumn("unix_timestamp").isGreaterThan(
        subtract(function("toUnixTimestamp", function("now")),
        literal(3600)));
// SELECT * FROM sensor_data WHERE id=? AND unix_timestamp>tounixtimestamp(now())-3600

Operations can be nested, and will get parenthesized according to the usual precedence rules.

Type hints

typeHint forces a term to a particular CQL type. For instance, it could be used to ensure that an expression uses floating-point division:

selectFrom("test")
    .all()
    .whereColumn("k").isEqualTo(literal(1))
    .whereColumn("c").isGreaterThan(divide(
            typeHint(literal(1), DataTypes.DOUBLE), 
            literal(3)));
// SELECT * FROM test WHERE k=1 AND c>(double)1/3

Raw CQL snippets

Finally, it is possible to provide a raw CQL snippet with raw(); it will get appended to the query as-is, without any syntax checking or escaping:

selectFrom("sensor_data").all().whereColumn("id").isEqualTo(raw("  1 /*some random comment*/"));
// SELECT * FROM sensor_data WHERE id=  1 /*some random comment*/

This should be used with caution, as it’s possible to generate invalid CQL that will fail at execution time; on the other hand, it can be used as a workaround to handle new CQL features that are not yet covered by the query builder.