JOOQ generator: use existing enums

Question

I am using nu.studer.jooq gradle plugin to generate pojos, tables and records for a PostgreSQL database with tables that have fields of type ENUM. We already have the enums in the application, so I would like that the generator uses those enums instead of generating new ones. I defined in build.gradle for the generator: udts = false, so it doesn't generate the enums, and I wrote a custom generator strategy that sets the package for the enums to be the one of the already existing enums. I have an issue in the generated table fields, the SQLDataType.VARCHAR.asEnumDataType(mypackage.ExistingEnum) doesn't work because the mypackage.ExistingEnum does not implement org.jooq.EnumType.

public enum ExistingEnum {
    VAL1, VAL2
}

Generated table record:

public class EntryTable extends TableImpl<EntryRecord> {
    public final TableField<EntryRecord, ExistingEnum> MY_FIELD = createField(DSL.name("my_field"), SQLDataType.VARCHAR.asEnumDataType(mypackage.ExistingEnum.class), this, "");

}

Is there something I can do to fix this issue? Also we have a lot of enums, so writing a converter for each of them is not suitable.

Answer 1

The point of having custom enum types is that they are individual types, independent of whatever you encode with your database enum types. As such, the jOOQ code generator cannot make any automated assumptions related to how to map the generated types to the custom types. You'll have to implement Converter types of some sort.

If you're not relying on the jOOQ provided EnumType types, you could use the <enumConverter/> configuration, or write implementations based on org.jooq.impl.EnumConverter, which help reduce boilerplate code.

If you have some conventions or rules how to map things a bit more automatically (just because jOOQ doesn't know your convention doesn't mean you don't know it either), you could implement a programmatic code generation configuration, where you query your dictionary views (e.g. PG_CATALOG.PG_ENUM) to generate ForcedType objects. You can even use jOOQ-meta for that purpose.