How to map postgresql “timestamp with time zone” in a JPA 2 entity

Question

I have a JPA 2 application ( with Hibernate 3.6 as the JPA implementation ) that uses Postgresql ( with the 9.0-801.jdbc3 JDBC driver ).

I am having trouble mapping

Answer 1

I eventually made this "work" - in a hackish sort of way - by turning off schema validation.

Previously, I had "hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" in my persistence.xml. When I commented out this property, my app server started and the model "worked".

The final form of my entity was:

@Entity
@Table(schema = "content", name = "theme")
public class Theme extends AbstractBaseEntity {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    @Column(name = "run_from", columnDefinition = "timestamp with time zone not null")
    @NotNull
    @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
    private Date runFrom;

    @Column(name = "run_to", columnDefinition = "timestampt with time zone not null")
    @NotNull
    @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
    private Date runTo;

    /* Getters, setters, .hashCode(), .equals() etc omitted */

After reading quite a bit on this, I got the impression is that there is no easy way to map Postgresql timestamp with time zone columns.

Some JPA implementation + database combinations support this natively ( EclipseLink + Oracle is one example ). For hibernate, with jodatime extensions, it is possible to store timezone aware timestamps using a normal timestamp + a varchar field for the timezone( I could not do that since I was constrained from changing the database schema ). Jadira user types or completely custom user types can also be used to tackle this problem.

I need to note that my use-case for this entity is "read only", so I could get away with a seemingly naive "solution".