With hibernate 3 I have a mapping with a MySQL schema.

The char(3) datatype fields (started as varchar(3) but converted internally to char(3)) are mapped with Hibernate tools to java.lang.Character, which is unfortunate.

Also, if the field is null, even with not-null="false" in the mapping, I get:

java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: 0
at java.lang.String.charAt(String.java:558)
at org.hibernate.type.CharacterType.get(CharacterType.java:28)
at org.hibernate.type.NullableType.nullSafeGet(NullableType.java:77)
at org.hibernate.type.NullableType.nullSafeGet(NullableType.java:68)
at org.hibernate.type.AbstractType.hydrate(AbstractType.java:80)
at org.hibernate.persister.entity.BasicEntityPersister.hydrate(BasicEntityPersister.java:1690)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.loadFromResultSet(Loader.java:991)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.instanceNotYetLoaded(Loader.java:942)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.getRow(Loader.java:855)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.getRowFromResultSet(Loader.java:305)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.doQuery(Loader.java:412)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.doQueryAndInitializeNonLazyCollections(Loader.java:218)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.doList(Loader.java:1593)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.list(Loader.java:1577)
at org.hibernate.loader.criteria.CriteriaLoader.list(CriteriaLoader.java:111)
at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.list(SessionImpl.java:1322)
at org.hibernate.impl.CriteriaImpl.list(CriteriaImpl.java:300)

I've been able to get around the issue by converting the field(s) to a String datatype, but this isn't ideal as I can no longer use the tools to generate the classes.

Is this a known problem?