Java EE5 Persistence and Generics

The new Java EE5 Persistence provides some really cool functionality. It was designed with backwards compatibility in mind. This has resulted in some interesting issues. For example if you perform a Query which returns more than one object, the objects are returned as a List. The List is a very generic Object List. Generally we know that if we perform a query that it should return specific types back to us. For example we expect it to return a collection of the entity itself. If we accept the default which is to return a List, the compiler will report an unchecked warning. If you use the -Xlint:unchecked option, it will point out that we are getting a generic Object List and it can not verify the type of the Object.

The Solution... is simple...

When you get the List back cast it into a specific type. For example:

Query q = em.createQuery("SELECT OBJECT(p) FROM PuzzleBox p");
List puzzles = q.getResultList();

A rather elegent solution... alternatively you can have a more complex version such as

ArrayList puzzles = new ArrayList(q.getResultList);

This works because an ArrayList can accept a Collection as noted in the Javadocs:

ArrayList(Collection<? extends E> c)

The last and most inelegent solution is to annotate the methods which use the generic List of Objects to suppress the complier warnings with a @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") annotation.