In the careers of most Spring/Hibernate developers I know, there sooner or later comes a point of no escape...they have to write a Hibernate user type. The first one is usually of the copy'n'paste variety, and by and large works perfectly well.
But when things are no longer going quite as expected - Hibernate is ignoring changes to items managed by the user type, for instance - it often becomes apparent that one doesn't sufficiently understand how these user type thingies are supposed to work. At least, that's what happened to me.
In this post, we'll be dissecting the Hibernate UserType interface, explaining the relationships between the various methods, and developing a set of base user types that capture common use cases. (more...)

Tags: Hibernate user type
Filed under Hibernate, JPA, Java | 7 Comments »