[eclipselink-users] Converters, non-standard datatypes, and nulls

[Mike Traum <Mike.Traum@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
I've been working with a user on an active thread about writing a 
converter for a spatial datatype under postgres/postgis. This brought up 
an issue I've had in the past. It seems that when you're dealing with 
non-standard types (not a normal sql type), everything is generally 
fine. But, there always seems to be a problem when trying to store a 
null value for that type - postgres throws an exception about the column 
being of type varchar instead of the actual type.

I did a little debugging, and it seems the DatabaseField.sqlType  is not 
being set.  If  I add the code below to the converter (sets the sqlType 
to java.sql.Types.OTHER), it seems to always work. Should this be a fix 
in eclipselink (or, even better, set the type to java.sql.Types.NULL 
when the value is null)?

 public void initialize(DatabaseMapping dm, Session session) {
   dm.getField().setSqlType(java.sql.Types.OTHER);
 }

Thanks,
Mike