JPA map collection of Enums

Question

Is there a way in JPA to map a collection of Enums within the Entity class? Or the only solution is to wrap Enum with another domain class and use it to map the collection?<

Answer 1

tl;dr A short solution would be the following:

@ElementCollection(targetClass = InterestsEnum.class)
@CollectionTable
@Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
Collection interests;

The long answer is that with this annotations JPA will create one table that will hold the list of InterestsEnum pointing to the main class identifier (Person.class in this case).

@ElementCollections specify where JPA can find information about the Enum

@CollectionTable create the table that hold relationship from Person to InterestsEnum

@Enumerated(EnumType.STRING) tell JPA to persist the Enum as String, could be EnumType.ORDINAL