How to persist LocalDate with JPA?

Question

I want to store Date without time into my database. So, I choose to use LocalDate type.

As mentioned in this article, I use a JPA converter to convert

Answer 1

Since this is a very common question, this answer is based on this article I wrote about the best way to map Date and Timestamp with JPA.

JPA 2.2 added support for mapping Java 8 Date/Time API, like LocalDate, LocalTime, LocalDateTime, OffsetDateTime or OffsetTime.

So, let's assume we have the following entity:

@Entity(name = "UserAccount")
@Table(name = "user_account")
public class UserAccount {

    @Id
    private Long id;

    @Column(name = "first_name", length = 50)
    private String firstName;

    @Column(name = "last_name", length = 50)
    private String lastName;

    @Column(name = "subscribed_on")
    private LocalDate subscribedOn;

    //Getters and setters omitted for brevity
}

Notice that the subscribedOn attribute is a LocalDate Java object.

When persisting the UserAccount:

UserAccount user = new UserAccount()
    .setId(1L)
    .setFirstName("Vlad")
    .setLastName("Mihalcea")
    .setSubscribedOn(
        LocalDate.of(
            2013, 9, 29
        )
    );

entityManager.persist(user);

Hibernate generates the proper SQL INSERT statement:

INSERT INTO user_account (
    first_name, 
    last_name, 
    subscribed_on, 
    id
) 
VALUES (
    'Vlad', 
    'Mihalcea', 
    '2013-09-29', 
    1
)

When fetching the UserAccount entity, we can see that the LocalDate is properly fetched from the database:

UserAccount userAccount = entityManager.find(
    UserAccount.class, 1L
);

assertEquals(
    LocalDate.of(
        2013, 9, 29
    ),
    userAccount.getSubscribedOn()
);