My goal was to create a simple, extensible Enum converter that would work with iBatis. This seems like a trivial problem, but took me a while to find a proper solution. There were some additional preconditions:

• all given Enums are jaxb generated objects - but any standard Java Enum should work
• conversion was 1-to-1, no special conditions and processing

The example Enum for this problem looks like this one (copy&paste from jaxb generated source):

@XmlType(name ="ServiceType") 
@XmlEnum
public enum ServiceType {

    @XmlEnumValue("stationary")
    STATIONARY("stationary"),
    @XmlEnumValue("mobile")
    MOBILE("mobile");
    private final String value;

    ServiceType(String v) {
        value = v;
    }

    public String value() {
        return value;
    }

    public static ServiceType fromValue(String v) {
        for (ServiceType c: ServiceType.values()) {
            if (c.value.equals(v)) {
                return c;
            }
        }
        throw new IllegalArgumentException(v);
    }

}

"No big deal", you say. I beg to differ. What I wanted to achieve was a simple construction which would look like this when used for another Enum (CommonEnumTypeHandler is the name of my generic converter):

public class ServiceTypeHandler extends CommonEnumTypeHandler { }

Unfortunately due to the fact, that Java does not have reified generics, which is described in multiple places, I had to stick with passing through a Class type of my enum. So it looks like this:

public class ServiceTypeHandler extends CommonEnumTypeHandler {

    public ServiceTypeHandler() {
        super(ServiceType.class);
    }
}

My final class has to look like this one below:

import java.sql.SQLException;

import com.ibatis.sqlmap.client.extensions.ParameterSetter;
import com.ibatis.sqlmap.client.extensions.ResultGetter;
import com.ibatis.sqlmap.client.extensions.TypeHandlerCallback;

public abstract class CommonEnumTypeHandler implements TypeHandlerCallback {

    Class enumClass;

    public CommonEnumTypeHandler(Class clazz) {
        this.enumClass = clazz;
    }

    public void setParameter(ParameterSetter ps, Object o) throws SQLException {
        if (o.getClass().isAssignableFrom(enumClass)) {
            ps.setString(((T) o).name().toUpperCase());
        } else
            throw new SQLException("Excpected " + enumClass + " object than: " + o);
    }

    public Object getResult(ResultGetter rs) throws SQLException {
        Object o = valueOf(rs.getString());
        if (o == null)
            throw new SQLException("Unknown parameter type: " + rs.getString());
        return o;
    }

    public Object valueOf(String s) {
        return Enum.valueOf(enumClass, s.toUpperCase());
    }
}