Hello there,

I have the requirement to persist a collection of enums using hibernate.
There seems to be a raft of information on how to persist a single enum by declaring a user type and then associating genericised enums to the user type. This, I believe, is possible as the <property> element in the mapping file can be used in an 'open' fashion, which then allows the the use of the <type> element, such as:

<property name="articleType" column="ARTICLE_TYPE" not-null="false">
<type name="uk.co.smg.paymag.util.hibernate.EnumUserType">
<param name="enumClassName">uk.co.smg.paymag.model.ArticleType</param>
</type>
</property>

However, I am struggling to replicate this 2 stage mapping declaration process using a collection, specifically an array.
The issue, as I see it, is that when declaring my association type (one-to-many) within the <array> collection element, the <one-to-many> element has been declared as 'empty' and as such I only get one opportunity to declare my usertype in the 'class' attribute:

<array name="jobTypes" cascade="save-update,persist">
<key column="JOB_ALERT_JOB_TYPE"/>
<list-index column="id"/>
<one-to-many class="uk.co.smg.paymag.util.jobs.JobType"/>
</array>

So, basically I would like to know if anyone has found a way to persist a collection of enums using hibernate.

Any help much appreciated.

You can persist a collection of enums by using <element> inside the <array> mapping:


You don't need to provide a hibernate mapping file for the enum type. Hibernate serailizes the enum into a separate table holding the array data. The table name defaults to the array's property name but can be specified by a table attribute in the array element.

Mike