Skip to Main Content
Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook
book

Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook

by James Elliott
May 2004
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
192 pages
4h 46m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook

6. Persistent Enumerated Types

An enumerated type is a common and useful programming abstraction allowing a value to be selected from a fixed set of named choices. These were originally well represented in Pascal, but C took such a minimal approach (essentially just letting you assign symbolic names to inter-changeable integer values) that early Java releases reserved C's enum keyword but declined to implement it. A better, object-oriented approach known as the "typesafe enum pattern" evolved and was popularized in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java Programming Language Guide (Addison-Wesley). This approach requires a fair amount of boilerplate coding, but it lets you do all kinds of interesting and powerful things. The Java 1.5 specification resuscitates the enum keyword as an easy way to get the power of typesafe enumerations without all the tedious boilerplate coding, and it provides other nifty benefits.

In this chapter:

  • Defining a Persistent Enumerated Type

  • Working with Persistent Enumerations

Regardless of how you implement an enumerated type, you're sometimes going to want to be able to persist such values to a database.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Getting Started with Hibernate 3

Getting Started with Hibernate 3

James Elliott

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596006969Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata