ORMLite and Images saved as BLOB on Android

Question

So I recently switched my database stuff over to ORMLite in my android tablet application I am writing. So far so good, got most things refactored/recoded. Though I am hav

Answer 1

You can indeed store byte[] fields in ORMLite. To quote the manual about byte arrays:

Array of bytes (byte[]) persisted as SQL type VARBINARY. This is different from the DataType.SERIALIZABLE type which serializes an object as an array of bytes.

NOTE: Because of backwards compatibility, any fields that are of type byte[] must be specified as DataType.BYTE_ARRAY or DataType.SERIALIZABLE using the dataType field and will not be auto-detected.

So, to use byte[] you will need to specify the type of the data:

@DatabaseField(dataType = DataType.BYTE_ARRAY)
byte[] imageBytes;

The trick is that ORMLite does not automatically detect the type of the byte[] because of some backwards compatibility issues.