Persist List of Embeddable in an Entity

Question

I want to persist a List of Embeddable Objects in an Entity. But without creating a new Table for the Objects in the List.

I want to persist the Entity in a way that the List of coordinates is serialized to a String and saved in the column named "coordinates" of the Entity Entity_A.

I know that i shouldn't do this because it's bad design. But in this case it is needed.

My Attempt to do it:

@Entity
class Entity_A implements Serializable {
    //... 

    private List<Coordinate> coordinates;
}

@Embeddable
class Coordinate implements Serializable {
    private Float lat;
    private Float lng;
    private Float alt;
}

It doesn't work. i don't get any error.

Do you have any ideas how i can do it?

Edit:

Coordinate needs to be embeddable, because i use it elsewhere.

Answer 1

With JPA 2.1 it is possible:

annotate coordinates field with @ElementCollection

@ElementCollection    
private List<Coordinate> coordinates;

See more on http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Java_Persistence/ElementCollection