I'm new to JPA/Hibernate. I did some searching and couldn't find an answer to this seemingly easy problem.

I'm writing a large app that is hitting a legacy database. That database is accessed by millions and millions of lines of non-java legacy code so changing the database is not an option. The database has hundreds and hundreds of tables and thousands of columns. Unfortunately they stored their strings as CHAR(xx) data types.

We're using JPA with Hibernate as our implementation. All the Strings loaded into my entity classes have trailing spaces due to the CHAR(xx) data types in the tables. So for example instead of a first name being "John" it's "John ".

Is there an easy way to get these to be automatically trimmed? I really hate the idea of writing this into the getters of a large number of entities.

It seems like I read that some other JPA implementations automatically do this trimming. I'm hoping that there is an easy way to get Hibernate to behave this way as well.

Thanks for any advice.