How to avoid bloated DAO with information retrieval methods?

Question

Software design

Hello. I read a lot of information, but did not understand how they act in practice.
I have a DAO, for example to search for articles. Accordingly, the FindById, FindByDate, FindByDateInterval methods, and so on, immediately appear.
I would like to have one Find method, where conditions are magically inserted and a selection is obtained. My project can have both mysql and xml databases. So I would like a solution abstracted from the storage, because DAO is used for this.

Answer 1

In normal languages ​​there is a concept of "method signature".

Answer 2

Pass a filter object to find with fields id, date, etc., some of which will contain a value for filtering, the rest will be null.
We can try to pass not the filter object, but directly the partially filled object template that we are looking for. But then it will be impossible to specify intervals or sets of values.