Is there such thing CASE expression in JPQL?

It has been added in JPA 2.0

Usage:

SELECT e.name, CASE WHEN (e.salary >= 100000) THEN 1 WHEN (e.salary < 100000) THEN 2 ELSE 0 END FROM Employee e

Ref: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Java_Persistence/JPQL_BNF#New_in_JPA_2.0

There is certainly such thing in Hibernate so when you use Hibernate as your JPA provider then you can write your query as in this example:

    Query query = entityManager.createQuery("UPDATE MNPOperationPrintDocuments o SET o.fileDownloadCount = CASE WHEN o.fileDownloadCount IS NULL THEN 1 ELSE (o.fileDownloadCount + 1) END " +
                                            " WHERE o IN (:operations)");
    query.setParameter("operations", mnpOperationPrintDocumentsList);

    int result = query.executeUpdate();

You can use the event listeners provided by Jpa to do something when you load one row of the db, ie:

@Entity
@Table(name = "TableA")
public class TableA {

    @Id
    @Column(name = "Field1")
    private Long id;

    @Column(name = "Field2")
    private Long field2;

    @Column(name = "Field3")
    private Long field3;

    // ... more associated getter and setter...

    @Transient
    private String field4;

    @PostLoad
    private void onLoad() {
        if (field2 != null) {
            switch (field2.intValue()) {
            case 1:
                field4 = "One";
                break;
            case 2:
                field4 = "Two";
                break;
            default:
                field4 = "Other Number";
                break;
            }
        }
    }
}

(the field4 not persist in the db)

(take this like an workaround to "non implemented feature in JPA" like case statements)