I have defined a class called Time which stores a time value as a BigInteger. I would like many of my entities to have Time properties, but they should all work the same, the only difference being the name of the column. For instance:

class A {
Time startTime;
}
class B {
Time logOnTime;
}
...

My problem is, if I implement class Time as an @Embeddable, both entity A and B will get a column called timeValue, which is the column name found my embeddable time. If I try to redefine this name using an @AttributeOverride annotation it looks like this:

class A {
@AttributeOverride(name="timeValue", column=@Column(name="startTime", precision=17, scale=3, nullable=false, updatable=false))
private Time startTime;
}

The problem with this approach is I have to repeat the precision, scale, and other properties, and I am not too keen on repeating this information in all my entity classes.

Is there some way I can redefine the column name *only*, and still leave it up to the embeddable type to decide the precision, scale, nullability, etc.?

Thanks

Randahl

I tried implementing a custom user type TimeType too, but that too seemed to require that I repeated column definition information all over the place, not with @AttributeOverride, but using a @Column tag.

Any clues?

I just tried using a custom user type. I was hoping that all I had to write in each entity would be

@Type(type="iTime")
private Time startTime;

But then my big integer time value is stored with precision 19 scale 2, so I am forced to repeat this all over the place:

@Column(precision=17, scale=3)
@Type(type="iTime")
private Time startTime;

I would really like not to scatter this column definition in multiple entities. Any ideas?