Extreme Java

Assume you have a simple enum:

public enum Status {
  ACCEPTED, REJECTED, NOTREADDEN
}

And your legacy database stores it as ordinal values (ACCEPTED = 0, REJECTED = 1, NOTREADDEN = 2). For reasons lost in time, DBA created the column as “varchar”. If you want to use JPA, you will have a bad time using Hibernate:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: No enum const class mypkg.Status.1
  java.lang.Enum.valueOf(Enum.java:196)
  org.hibernate.type.EnumType.nullSafeGet(EnumType.java:110)

After digging into EnumType.java, I noticed it is hardcoded “if-varchar-then-name-else-ordinal”. I assume they never dealed with ancient, legacy databases.

If I switch to TopLink, it works as expected… One thumb down to Hibernate…

Tags: enum, hibernate, jpa, ordinal, varchar

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under Java EE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.