[OPENJPA-1541] Support Enum as Primary Key Type

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Open
• Priority: Critical
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.0-beta
• Component/s: competitive, jpa
• Environment: All
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: bernard
• Created: 25/Feb/10 20:38
• Updated: 11/Nov/12 11:12

Description

Enums work as primary keys in TopLink and EclipseLink. DataNucleus supports them, too:

http://www.datanucleus.org/products/accessplatform/jpa/primary_key.html

It would be good to also include this in the specification because, not to support type safety in primary keys is fairly sad.

Enum is a basic language feature, and most applications would enjoy significant benefits by mapping the keys of those little system behavior controlling lookup tables to enums.

Consider a payment_type table. One can only generate the IDs of the table and use them for switching safely when the ids are mapped to enums. Any such application would typically have a PaymentType enum anyway.