How do I force Hibernate to return an empty value instead of null?

Question

I'm using Oracle 11GR2 and when the varchar2 field is empty, doing a System.out.println on the empty field will display null on my Eclipse console. How can I have it display the empty string instead?

Answer 1

doing the trick in getter is fine but it kind of change the desired behavior of the model.

As quoted in my comment, Oracle has no way to distinguish between empty string and null. If you are sure that all string attribute you are using will never be null, you may create an interceptor in hibernate like this

public class EmptyStringInterceptor extends EmptyInterceptor {
   @Override
   public boolean onLoad(Object entity, 
                         Serializable id, 
                         Object[] state, 
                         String[] propertyNames,
                         Type[] types) {
      for (int i = 0; i < types.length; i++) {
         if (StringType.equals(types[i]) && state[i] == null) {
               state[i] = "";
         }
      }
      return true;
   }
}

You may refer to Hibernate's document for use of interceptor

Answer 2

your getter method:

public String getVarchar2()
{
    if(this.varchar2==null)
        return "";
    else
        return this.varchar2;
}