jOOQ: when fetching into a Enum field, how to ensure it throws an exception if the value cannot mapped

Question

We use jOOQ 3.15.4 with Spring Boot 2.6.2

We have an enum stored as a string in database. It looks like this in the generated code:

public final TableField<StatusRecord, String> STATUS = createField(DSL.name("status"), SQLDataType.VARCHAR(255).nullable(false), this, "");

When reading it, we fetch into an object with @Column annotations:

@Column(name = "status")
StatusEnum status

The behavior we see is that when we have a string in DB that does not correspond to any value of the enum, the status field in the object that we map into is null.

Is there a way to have this type safe, and have a MappingException thrown when the string cannot be mapped to the enum, like the standard behavior of the valueOf method of an enum?

Answer 1

The topic has been discussed a few times in jOOQ's issue tracker, mailing list, etc. There's a pending feature request to change the current behaviour of ignoring inconvertible values to throwing exceptions, see eg https://github.com/jOOQ/jOOQ/issues/3377

It wasn't easy to do in the past without breaking compatibility as the conversions were implemented in static methods. But since jOOQ 3.14, we have a ConverterProvider SPI , so it might be possible to make this configurable, and gradually move towards a fail-fast strategy.

Having said so, you can implement your own ConverterProvider and add such checks to it. Alternatively, you can attach a custom Converter to your Field using code generation configuration , and let it throw whenever an invalid value is mapped.