title: JPA concat operator
body: <p>Is there a JPA concat operator for string concatenation?</p>
  
  <p>I know there is a JPA <code>CONCAT</code> function, however its ugly to use for concatenating multiple strings.</p>
  
  <pre><code>CONCAT(CONCAT(CONCAT(cola,colb),colc),cold)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Vendors like Oracle offer <code>||</code> some other like Microsoft offer  <code>+</code>. Is there a standard JPA concatenation operator so that I could create a query like</p>
  
  <pre><code>cola || colb || colc || cold
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried <code>+</code> using openjpa with SQL Server, however it seems to be invalid JPQL. I couldn't find anything regarding such an operator in an <a href="http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16764_01/apirefs.1111/e13946/ejb3_langref.html" rel="noreferrer">oracle reference</a>.</p>