1. Overview
In this quick tutorial, we’ll take a look at JSR-330‘s @Size annotation, Hibernate‘s @Length annotation, and JPA‘s @Column‘s length attribute.
At first blush, these may seem the same, but they perform different functions.
2. Origins
Simply put, all of these annotations are meant to communicate the size of a field.
@Size and @Length are similar. We can use either annotation to validate the size of a field. The former is a Java-standard annotation, while the latter is specific to Hibernate.
@Column, though, is a JPA annotation that we use to control DDL statements.
Now let’s go through each of them in detail.
3. @Size
For validations, we’ll use @Size, a bean validation annotation. We’ll use the property middleName annotated with @Size to validate its value between the attributes min and max:
public class User {
// ...
@Size(min = 3, max = 15)
private String middleName;
// ...
}
Most importantly, @Size makes the bean independent of JPA and its vendors, such as Hibernate. As a result, it’s more portable than @Length.
4. @Length
As we previously mentioned, @Length is the Hibernate-specific version of @Size. We’ll enforce the range for lastName using @Length:
@Entity
public class User {
// ...
@Length(min = 3, max = 15)
private String lastName;
// ...
}
5. @Column(length=value)
@Column is quite different from the previous two annotations.
We’ll use @Column to indicate specific characteristics of the physical database column. We’ll use the length attribute of the @Column annotation to specify the string-valued column length:
@Entity
public class User {
@Column(length = 3)
private String firstName;
// ...
}
The resulting column will be generated as a VARCHAR(3), and trying to insert a longer string will result in an SQL error.
Note that we’ll use @Column only to specify table column properties, as it doesn’t provide validations.
Of course, we can use @Column together with @Size to specify database column properties with bean validation:
@Entity
public class User {
// ...
@Column(length = 5)
@Size(min = 3, max = 5)
private String city;
// ...
}
6. Conclusion
In this article, we learned about the differences between the @Size annotation, @Length annotation, and @Column‘s length attribute. Then we examined each separately within the areas of their use.
As always, the full source code of the examples is available over on GitHub.
