Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)

Hi all I am sure this is simple but it's not obvious to me at the moment.

With a preparedStatement I have I the first time I call it it needs 3 parameters, if I don't get a result from this then I need to do the same call again with only the first 2 parameters being important (I want the third one to match on everything).

for some reason I thought putting in "*" as the string to search for would work - don't ask why, upon encountering the error I realized how dumb that would be. I am trying to find out if there is a generic wildcard for this or is it something that varies from driver to driver ? Is what I want to do even possible ? I can do it by re-creating the statement with the new query that is one shorter but that would not be favorable at all as the above is the toy case in actuality to what is needed.

as always thanks for any advice on the matter.