How to insert enum type entity in MySQL with JPA

[Jack Bush]

Hi All,

I would like to find out how to use entityManager.persist() in JPA to insert enum type object with its descriptive name as opposed to the index / positional number. For instance, we have the following enum type:

public enum Color { Blue, Red, Yellow, Green, White, Black };

The data inserted into MySQL is 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 as opposed to Blue, Red, Yellow, Green, White and Black.

I need to use third-party reporting tools and native SQL and would like to use the descriptive name.

Thanks a lot,

Jack

[James Sutherland]

Use, @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)

See,

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Java_Persistence/Basic_Attributes#Enums

[Karsten Wutzke]

ENUM worked with me when I named its elements the same as the enum values, here ENUM('Blue', 'Red', 'Yellow', ...). If you want all uppercase enums in Java with underscores, you need to do so in the DBs column declaration, too.

Karsten

[Jack Bush]

Hi James & Karsten,

Thank you for responding to this threat and the valuable reference material. Nevertheless, the enum type I had in mind was to do with using a pre-defined type such as Color in another class called Definition.java. This class holds all global types for all applications. Below is the scenario I am referring to:

Definition.java

  public enum Color { Blue, Red, Yellow, Green, White, Black };


Car.java

import definition.Color;

@Entity
public class Car implements Serializable {
    ......
    @Id
    @Column(name="COLOR")
    private Color color;
    public Color getColor)
    {
	return color;
    }
    public void setColor(Color color)
    {
	this.color = color;
    }
    .....

CarApplicationClient.java

import definition.Color;
      .........
      XPath colorXPath = XPath.newInstance("//US/LA/Color");
      org.jdom.Element colorElement =
              (org.jdom.Element) colorXPath.selectSingleNode(vehicleJDOMDocument);
              car.setColor((Color) colorElement.getTextNormalize()); 
      .........

The last line (33) resulted in "inconvertible type, required definition.Color, found java.util.String" compilation error.

How to cast colorElement.getTextNormalize() string to Color object to be persisted as part of Car record in MySQL database? Is this possible to achieve or do I need to define Color in Car entity class instead?

Thanks again,

Jack

[James Sutherland]

Use Enum.valueOf(Color.class, text) to convert a String to an enum.

[Jack Bush]

Hi James,

Yes, both @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING) & Enum.valueOf(Color.class, text) have worked.

Thank you very much,

Jack