Hi,

I'm using JPA 1 with Hibernate/JBoss5.1.0.GA as my provider. I have a few entities with String fields that need to be mapped to columns without length restrictions. I haven't seen any JPA documentation that describes a way to remove the character length restriction other than picking some arbitrarily large number. Since we always use PostgreSQL in our production and development environments we are working around this by using the @Column annotation like



to remove the default 255 character limit. The problem we run into though is that our unit tests, using HSQL, fail because HSQL's unbounded character type is called 'longvarchar'. So my questions are:

1) Is there something in the JPA spec, or does Hibernate provide a vendor specific approach, that I am overlooking?
2) Assuming answer to (1) is "no, it's not possible", then is there something in the schema export that I can hook into and override column definition when running my JUnits? I'm thinking something along the lines of overriding a method or registering some callback that will receive the column info and alter 'character varying' to 'longvarchar'.

If this isn't possible then I'll have to resort to standing up a PostgreSQL db that automated tests run against, but I don't like this approach cause HSQL makes it really easy for developers and our build machine to run tests locally without having any external dependencies.

*bump*

Surely I'm not the only one who's run into this problem

In case someone will need a solution for this.
1. Overwrite type mapping in dialects

2. Specify corresponding length in mapping:

3. In Hibernate configuration set property hibernate.dialect=my.package.MyPostgreSQLDialect
4. In test Hibernate configuration set property hibernate.dialect=my.package.MyHsqlDialect

After this Hibernate will use 'character varying' as column type for dev and production and 'longvarchar' for tests.