Conditions without parenthesis

[dnnancy]

Conditions without parenthesis

[benlaan]

Hi @dnnancy, this functionality is by design. It is intended that the series of AND expressions is parsed as a chain of AND CriteriaExpressions. This is how abstract syntax trees (AST) work. Unless I'm mistaken!

Your example results in the following graph:

              CriteriaExpression(AND)
               /                       \
  CreditLimit = 1000                 CriteriaExpression(AND)
                                    /                    \
                        Email LIKE '%...'       TwitterId = 'joe'

Unless the sql includes brackets, it is not a nested expression. A nested expression contains one other expression which will incorporate the AST that describes the inner expression. This would result in a parent node of the current root node in the above graph.

Could you give me an example of how the current functionality is broken?

[dnnancy]

Hi @benlaan, thanks for looking into this, and also the explanation. The current challenge is, when walking through the tree, we don't know whether it is an actual condition (leaf node) or an nested CriteriaExpression unless we evaluate the operator in string format ("AND", "OR"), which is probably not very efficient, I suppose.

I am also wondering if it is possible to support Operator enum which would be more efficient when using the parser.

Thanks again.