title: Simple Distinct in Spring JPA
body: <p>How would you get a list/array of the distinct values in a table using JPA?</p>
  
  <p>Lets say I have an entity and repository of a Foo object from a table that has columns a, b, c.  All I want is to determine all unique(distinct) values in column b where c equals "bar" and have it (the distinct values of b)returned as a list of Strings (not Foo objects).</p>
  
  <p>Other ORM's I have found it very simple to do, but I can't seem to figure out how to do this via JPA.  It's a query that's not mapped to an object, but rather just extracting values as a simple list of Strings.</p>
  
  <p>Can this be done in JPA, if so, how?</p>