I've searched older threads on this issue and see that people have successfully set up blobs on PostgreSQL, but I've tried to replicate and haven't had any luck. I'm trying to store image files in a blob column and have tried the following hbm mappings/tabledefs with no luck:

Postgre datatype bytea w/ Hibernate types binary (throws a CGLIB exception on startup) and blob (Postgre throws a "bad integer" exception on flush).

Tried Postgre datatype OID with Hibernate blob (no exceptions, but no data gets written) and binary (throws ClassCastException net.sf.hibernate.type.BinaryType.deepCopyNotNull)

The java code to do the write is below. Any help would be much appreciated

InputStream stream = file.getInputStream();
Session session = HibernateListener.open(request);
ManageUserService.ManageUser mu = ManageUserService.getManageUser();
User user = mu.getUserById(userid, session);
Blob photo = Hibernate.createBlob(stream);
user.setPhoto(photo);
session.flush(); //this is where it bombs out
session.connection().commit();
session.close();

user.setPhoto(photo);
session.flush(); //this is where it bombs out
sess.save(user);session.connection().commit();
session.close();


regards!

Just to follow up so nobody else has to go through the aggravation that I did with this....

With the current PostgreSQL JDBC driver, there is no way for Hibernate to talk to PostgreSQL blobs. You have to use the native LargeObject API, which stores the blobs in a special system table (pg_largeobject). The only way to associate it with your Hibernate entities is to create an integer field and store the UID of the blob there. To retrieve, load up your hibernate entity object, retrieve the blob id, then retrieve the blob through straight JDBC and the LargeObject API.

It is probable that you could do at least some of this work in a UserType.

Hmmmm......

Any suggestions on how to create that UserType. I just had to convert to postgresql and discovered this problem about five minutes ago. :(

Learn how to do it by writing code using direct SQL/JDBC, and then figure out how to re-implement that using a UserType.

Ah, it's a non-issue now. I'm using binary instead of blob, which works like a champ for my purposes. I don't think it would have been too hard to hard to rewrite the BinaryBlobType example from http://www.hibernate.org/73.html, though.