Is there an automated way to chop off strings that are too long when persisting in hibernate? For example:

If I persist the class that contains the name field and it's >255 characters, I'll get an ugly exception:


So I could truncate the name field in the setName setter, but that's a bit ugly as I'm truncating all the already truncated names when reading them from the database (what I'll mostly be doing). Additionally, I'll have to keep a maxLength field for each String property in all of my POJOs. Lastly, I don't want to restrict my POJOs necessarily this way, only when persisting them. Ideally there's an attribute for the property element called truncate="true", but I couldn't find this in any hibernate documentation.

What's the best way to automatically truncate Strings to their max hibernate specified length?

I don't know if this is the best way, but using a UserType should work. See http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... pes-custom for an introduction.