The great thing about hibernate is that persistent classes do not need to implement special interfaces for persistence...except for Persistent Enum Type (see hibernate doc 4.2.3).
Imagine I have an "Address" object. One of the fields is "Continent". Continent is a typesafe enumeration ={africa, europe,...}
An address can be serialized and sent from the server to a swing client. So the "Address" and "Continent" classes should be unaware of the persistence mechanism...and nothing to do with net.sf.hibernate packages.

According to chapter 4.2.3 of hibernate doc, "Continent" should implement net.sf.hibernate.PersistentEnum. Is it possible to avoid that?

In the mapping document, I don't want to write "Continent" as the typename but rather a "Continenthelper" that wraps "Continent" and implements "PersistentEnum".

Or maybe I should use the "UserType" interface (quoting from source code: "it is a class that knows how to serialize instances of another class to and from JDBC.")

What would be the easiest strategy?
Can someone provide with a fully working example?

Regards,

olivier Roussille

Yes, use a UserType

The only drawback in this approach is that you won't be able to write something like:


as you would do with Hibernate enums.

As Continent are not Entities (regarding Hibernate's nomenclature), the only solution seems to be:


Hence re-introducing a dependency to the persistence. Although this is a minor issue in this case, the Hibernate Enum approach was a nicer solution...