Can JPA be persuaded to convert between eg UUIDs and Strings?

Question

I have a Java object with a field which is a UUID. I'd like to be able to persist this object to the database in the obvious way; however, the Basic mapping will use Java serialization to write it, while I want the UUID to be present in its obvious string form. Is there a way to supply a UUID <-> String converter to JPA for that field which will be used at read and write time so I can handle this type naturally?

Answer 1

JPA 2.0 doesn't provide a general way to do it, except for creating separate getters/setters for different representations of the same field.

Depending on your JPA provider you can use implementation-specific methods, for example, Hibernate provides a uuid-char type for this purpose:

@Type(type = "uuid-char")
private UUID uuid;