[hibernate-dev] Mapping JPA's @MapKeyEnumerated and @Enumerated on native-enum supporting datastores

In the context of Hibernate OGM, it turns out that some datastores have a rather nice "native" support for enums. We aim to map each property of the user's domain model to its most appropriate "physical type", unless the choice is overriden by the an explicit user request. In the case of an Enum, JPA annotations such as @Enumerated have an attribute EnumType to choose the physical representation: public enum EnumType { /** Persist enumerated type property or field as an integer. */ ORDINAL, /** Persist enumerated type property or field as a string. */ STRING } However, there's no support for a "NATIVE". Also, the annotation specifies that "ORDINAL" is the default value so I can't just assume that the user didn't specify anything and we're good to use our own NATIVE implementation. Assuming that we can't change the JPA spec, any suggestion on when I could have the Hot Rod dialect for OGM to actually produce a "nice" mapping into native enums? I'm tempted to just use natives all the time; In the case in which the user opted for "STRING" I could drop a warning - or decide to honour that - but in case of ORDINAL I just can't tell if it's a default choice or not so I think a warning would be too much. Another alternative would be that I "go native" when the @Enumerated annotation isn't specified at all: looks like this mapping is valid according to ORM as it seems to treat it as if there was an implicit @Enumerated annotation; I'm not happy about having to rely on people to not use an explicit annotation though. Thanks, Sanne