Problem with sql;query tag! Please help ...

Question

Dear all,
I have the following SQL statement submitted by a sql;query tag:
<c:out value='${namestring}'/> // <-- namestring is printed out as ABC-% here.
<sql:query var="resultset">
SELECT sales
FROM SALESTABLE
WHERE name LIKE <c:out value='${namestring}'/> //<-- appearently namestring is not ABC-% anymore!!!
</sql:query>
Everything is fine except the satement "WHERE name LIKE ?". The namestring passed in is supposed to be in the form 'ABC-%'. It indeed prints out as 'ABC-%' before the <sql:query/> tag.
Appearnetly, when it is passed to the statement "WHERE name LIKE ?", it becomes something else because it returns no data.
Note that when I hardcode 'ABC-%' to the WHERE statement, however, I do get a lot of data back.
I also tried to to use <sql:param/> tag to tackle it:
<sql:query var="resultset">
SELECT sales
FROM SALESTABLE
WHERE name LIKE ?
<sql:param value='${namestring}' />
</sql:query>
But still got no data. Is '%" considered as special characters that needs to be treated in a special way? What else do I need to do in order to pass in 'ABC-%' to the statement???
By the way, is there a way to print out the generated SQL statement to see how all the variables are evaluated?
Any help or suggestions will be highly appreciated. Thanks.
Robert.

Answer 1

Try to escape the special character '%' using '\%'.