Let cmp be a SQLQueryComposer or SingleSelectQueryComposer that gives a query like:

  SELECT foo, bar FROM qux WHERE baz > 5;

cmp.getStructuredFilter() returns something like:

 [[ {Name=baz, Handle=GREATER, Value="> 5"} ]]

while it should return something like:

 [[ {Name=baz, Handle=GREATER, Value="5"} ]]

The latter (not the former!) is the format expected by setStructuredFilter. Which means that (in Basic):

 cmp.StructuredFilter = cmp.StructuredFilter

will fail.

This has been noticed several times through the codebase, but instead of fixing getStructuredFilter(), each caller works around this.

IMHO we should fix it.

Anyway, encoding the operator in PropertyValue.Handle is IMHO an abuse of PropertyValue. This should have its own datatype (struct).

So instead of just fixing getStructuredFilter, we could just deprecate it and replace it by something better, e.g. along the lines of the suggestion in dbaccess/source/ui/browser/unodatbr.cxx (or something better):

// check if the columns participating in the filter refer to existing tables
// TODO: there's no API at all for this. The method which comes nearest to what we need is
// "getStructuredFilter", but it returns pure column names only. That is, for a statement like
// "SELECT * FROM <table> WHERE <other_table>.<column> = <value>", it will return "<column>". But
// there's no API at all to retrieve the information about  "<other_table>" - which is what would
// be needed here.
// That'd be a chance to replace getStructuredFilter with something more reasonable. This method
// has at least one other problem: For a clause like "<column> != <value>", it will return "<column>"
// as column name, "NOT_EQUAL" as operator, and "!= <value>" as value, effectively duplicating the
// information about the operator, and beding all clients to manually remove the "!=" from the value
// string.
// So, what really would be handy, is some
//   XNormalizedFilter getNormalizedFilter();
// with
//   interface XDisjunctiveFilterExpression
//   {
//     XConjunctiveFilterTerm getTerm( int index );
//   }
//   interface XConjunctiveFilterTerm
//   {
//     ComparisonPredicate getPredicate( int index );
//   }
//   struct ComparisonPredicate
//   {
//     XComparisonOperand   Lhs;
//     SQLFilterOperator    Operator;
//     XComparisonOperand   Rhs;
//   }
//   interface XComparisonOperand
//   {
//     SQLFilterOperand Type;
//     XPropertySet     getColumn();
//     string           getLiteral();
//     ...
//   }
//   enum SQLFilterOperand { Column, Literal, ... }
//
// ... or something like this ....



Notable caller: wizards/com/sun/star/wizards/db/SQLQueryComposer.java

See in particular the function getNormalizedStructuredFilter()