I have a sql query like this
select column from table where path = left(\'INPUTSTRING\', length(path));
and trying to accomplish it in hql
I'm not sure if HQL does this for you , but you can use IQuery/session.CreateSQLQuery() to use a raw SQL query to populate a mapped entity. I've never used it for substrings, but have used it for aggregate functions. Check chapter 13 of the NHibernate docs and see if that does it for you. You can check the query substitution available in Nhibernate - here