Hi,

Is there a clear answer to the question : what is the best way to persist enums.

I need to have a base class for my enums and I don't want to have one usertype class for each enum.

Browsing the site and the forum there is two differents possibilities :
- Use commons-lang valuedenum as shown at http://opensource.atlassian.com/project ... wse/HB-934
- Create my own persistentenum class that implements usertype. All my enums will extends this base class. There is a document on the wiki about that : http://www.hibernate.org/203.html

This solution seems very attractive for me as I need this base class for other purposes. Another benefit of this version is that I don't have to depends on commons-lang.

I just want Hibernate's team opinion about this implementation of enums. Is it something recommended or not ?

Thanx

Seb

I don't know if you knew it, I don't know if it will change something for you, but I just wanted to tell you that in jdk1.5.0 the type enum was implemented http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/releases/j2se15/

Maybe, it will be added soon to Hibernate...

I've seen on some discussion in this forum that enum are not planned to be implemented soon.

seb

jdk 1.5 Enums will be supported in Hibernate3

Is it possible to know if we have to create one UserType per enum or if jdk1.5 enums will be handled gracefully by hibernate without the need to create any other class

seb

It should be possible to use Enums just like any other natively supported type.

I'm trying to find out how to persist enums to a table.

As I have seen in dirrerent tutorials those enum records are static final variables of a usertype enum class. This data is not stored in any database table. I'd like my application to be able to add more records to this class on-the-fy. Solutions presented in tutorials would require modifying the source code of the usertype enum class.

I'd be nice if this data was kept in a separate table.

Hope it's understandable :-) Could anyone please describe a solution?

What you're describing does not sound like an enum, which implies a compile-time value type (or a reference type that behaves like a value type).

If you want the elements to vary at run-time based on the contents of a database table, then you might want to consider modeling it as a regular entity with its own table and associations to other entities/tables. This requires no special support in Hibernate.