On 09/07/2009 06:37 PM, Max Rydahl Andersen wrote:

What is this doing that a parameterized custom type can't do ? Is this "just" to get a cleaner hbm.xml syntax or ?

/max

Hi Max,

It addresses two issues that a custom type cannot address. First, it enables calling database functions that don't have an equivalent (or efficient) Java implementation. And second, since the conversion logic happens inside the database, relational operations can be applied to the decoded value such as sorting and non-equality searching.

For example, my primary use case is encryption. We have implemented an encryption package inside Oracle and we don't wish to replicate that logic in Java. But more importantly, there are certain fields that the business has told us we must encrypt (for example, the user's last name), but we still need to be able to sort on the plain text values and do partial-match searches using the LIKE operator. This can't be achieved with a custom type; the conversion must happen inside the database.

Regards,
-Rob