Grails / GORM criteria query with hasmany String

Question

I have a domain object (Cat) like this:

class Cat {
   String name

   static hasMany = [
      nicknames: String
   ]
}

(A cat has a name,

Answer 1

You can also use HQL (tested with Grails 2.5.0):

Cat.findAll("from Cat c inner join c.nicknames as n where upper(n) like '%'||?||'%'", [nickname.toUpperCase()])

Answer 2

You can use HQL for querying in such a scenario. For example,

Cat.findAll("from Cat c where :nicknames in elements(c.nicknames)", [nicknames:'kitty'])

Answer 3

After a lot of trying and researching, I found this will work with Grails 2.4.0, I don't know about older versions.

Cat.withCriteria {
    createAlias('nicknames', 'n') 
    ilike 'n.elements', '%kitty%'
}

The trick is to use 'n.elements'