Hibernate nicely supports enum ordinal type and string type out of the box as defined in the Java Persistence API (JPA) specification. But, sometimes with legacy databases you need custom enum mapping.

There is lot of information out there, but the following are the two most useful:

• Java 5 Enum Persistence with Hibernate in AppFuse
• Java 5 EnumUserType

So much meta information is specified for a simple enum in the above links. Wow! Something just doesn’t feel right about it. If I default / hardcode the identifierMethod and valueOfMethod, I can get it look like the following:

   1: @Column(name = "ORDER_TYPE")

   2: @Type(type = "ms.EnumUserType",

   3:         parameters = {@Parameter(name = "enumClass", value = "ms.domain.Order$OrderType")})

   4: private OrderType mOrderType;

Still, I am specifying redundant information in value because I should be able to figure that out by the declared type of the member variable OrderType in this case.