Hibernate with PostgreSQL using default value in Entity

Question

I'm developping an API using Springboot and PostgreSQL 12. I created a user table with hibernate and the entity field that is problematic is the following:

@Column(columnDefinition = "BOOLEAN NOT NULL DEFAULT FALSE")
private Boolean emailVerificationStatus = false;

My table seems to be correctly generated :

create table users (
   id int8 generated by default as identity,
    email varchar(120) not null,
    email_verification_status boolean default false not null,
    email_verification_token varchar(255),
    encrypted_password varchar(255) not null,
    first_name varchar(50) not null,
    last_name varchar(50) not null,
    user_id varchar(255) not null,
    primary key (id)
)

My issue is while running the application I receive an error message :

org.hibernate.PropertyValueException: not-null property references a null or transient value : fr.mycompany.app.io.entity.UserEntity.emailVerificationStatus

By default, when I create the user, it sends a null value. I can solve this issue by setting the value to false in my service layer but it's not very elegant. Also, When I remove the option nullable = false, it works fine but the value is set to null instead of getting the default value. It seems that postgresql doesn't take the default value (false) as value when I try to send a user to my API. I want to force changing null value to false by default.

Answer 1

According to the hibernate documentation you can try to use the following approach:

@Entity
@DynamicInsert
public class YourEntity {

  @ColumnDefault("false")
  private Boolean emailVerificationStatus;

  // ...
}

Please note that the entity above is annotated with the @DynamicInsert annotation so that the INSERT statement does not include any entity attribute that does not contain a value. So, this is allow you to avoid case described in the @MikeOrganek's answer.