Question

I have to use an existing Database that I can not change that uses this column definition:

"birthdate" date NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00'

The default value is not a valid date:

Exception in thread “main” java.lang.RuntimeException: Cannot convert value ‘0000-00-00’ from column 29 to TIMESTAMP.

Is there a way to return null from ormlite if the default value '0000-00-00' is found?

Answer 1

The only way you can do this is with a custom persister. You can then control how ORMLite stores and retrieves data from the database. This feature is [unfortunately] not well documented.

You specify the class like this:

@DatabaseField(persisterClass = MyDatePersister.class)
Date birthDate;

Then your persister class might look like:

public class MyDatePersister extends com.j256.ormlite.field.types.BaseDataType {
    private static final MyDatePersister singleTon = new MyDatePersister();
    @SuppressWarnings("deprecation")
    private static final Timestamp ZERO_TIMESTAMP = new Timestamp(0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0);

    private MyDatePersister() {
        super(SqlType.DATE, new Class<?>[] { Date.class });
    }

    public static MyDatePersister getSingleton() {
        return singleTon;
    }

    @Override
    public Object resultToSqlArg(FieldType fieldType, DatabaseResults results,
            int columnPos) throws SQLException {
        Timestamp timestamp = results.getTimestamp(columnPos);
        if (timestamp == null || ZERO_TIMESTAMP.equals(timestamp)) {
            return null;
        } else {
            return timestamp;
        }
    }
}

DateType source is online. Hope this helps.