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DMN - matching a Java enum by a FEEL expression

I have a Java enum as an input in a DMN decision table. The DMN call is embedded directly in the Java app. So take some enum:
public enum Foo {
ONE, TWO
}
I pass an instance of this enum as an input - dmnContext.set("Foo", foo);
I hoped to be able to set a decision table input for foo of type string, and have a rule that matched "ONE". However, this doesn't work, because there is no POJO-String conversion. In the Java code, I could store foo as a String and validate it against the enumerated values (i.e. check foo is in the set ["ONE", "TWO"]), but this will complicate other parts of the application.
How can I achieve this while still using an enum type?

Please refer to this existing JIRA record comment section, for the explanation about:
why you are experiencing that behaviour
and why you should convert your Java-enum to the expected DMN type (which I guess) is a FEEL:string , and not an enum
You can use Jackson to achieve this, instead of resorting to custom code or DMN model modification.
Don't hesitate to Subscribe to the JIRA linked above, as we're hoping of making that work out-of-the-box; but is not trivial since the DMN RTF is thinking about introducing Enumerations directly in DMN eventually, so we need to take into account today what might happen tomorrow.
Since you are linking to Red Hat Product documentation, a reminder that you are strongly encouraged to open a Customer Portal ticket at https://access.redhat.com/support/cases/#/ if you have a Subscription.
I will appreciate your feedback following there references/pointers and I hope those helps

Difference between JPA's AttributeConverter and Hibernate's ColumnTransformer in terms of Encryption and Decryption of attributes

I have a database which has some tables with encrypted columns. As of now, all these columns are of String type. I am using JPA's #Converter to encrypt and decrypt a column in a table. However, I also know, that I can use Hibernate's #ColumnTransformer to achieve the same objective of encryption and decryption while read and write operations. My question is how are they different and which is a better approach to use in terms of speed, maintainability, future enhancement, etc? Right now, #Converter is working fine with String type of data. I am not sure it will work with Integer type or I will have to create a new Converter class.

They're very similar and in many cases can be used for exactly the same thing, but the implementations of the solutions varies a bit.
One primary difference is that one is Hibernate specific and the other is part of the JPA specification. If you want to write code matching the specification, use #Converter and you'll be able to use other implementations besides Hibernate with your code.
Another major difference is that #ColumnTransformer operates on the database level whereas #Converter reads the value from the database as is, then converts it to something else on the application side. This may provide performance advantages for #ColumnTransformer as the database performs some operations.
Additionally you can actually create an AttributeConverter that applies automatically to all values of a given type. This can be advantageous for example in refactoring situations where you don't want to manually add a #Converter annotation to many places.
So they can both be used to perform similar things and neither is implicitly better than the other.

DDD valueObject and database schema

To end 2014 year I got a simple question I think.
I would like to use "DDD" a bit more, and I'm currently trying to experiment various usecases to learn more about DDD.
My current usecase is the following :
we have a new database schema that is using a classic pattern in our company : modeling our nomenclature table as "id / code / label". I think it's a pretty classic case when using hibernate for example.
But in the OO world things get "complciated" for something this simple when using a API like JDBC or QueryDSL. I need to fetch an object by its code, retrieve its id or load the full object and then set it as a one to one relation in another object.
I wondering :
this kind of nomenclature can be an enum (or a class with String cosnatnts depending on the developer). in DDD terms, it is my ValueObject
the id  /code / label in the database is not i18n friendly (it's not a prerequisite) so I don't see its advantages. Except when the table can be updated dynamically and the usecase is "pick something in a combobox loaded from this table and build a relation with another object : but that's all because if you have business rules that must be applied you need to know the new code etc etc).
My questions are :
do you often use the id / ocde / label pattern in your database model.
how do your model your nomenclature data ? (country is perhaps not the best example :) but no matter what how do you model it ? without thinking much I would say database table for country; but for some status : "valid, waiting validation, rejected" ?
do you model your valueObjects using this pattern ?
or do you use lots of enum and only store their toString (or ordinal) in the database ?
In the Java OO objects world, I'm currently thinking that it is easier to manipulate enum that objects loaded from the database. I need to build repositories to load them for example. And it will be so simple to use them as enums. I'm searching some recomfort here or perhaps am I missing something so obvious ?
thanks
see you in 2015 !
Update 1 :
We can create a "Budget" and the first one is mark as Initial and the next ones are marked as "Corrective" (with a increment). For example, we can have a list of Budgets :"Initial Budget", "Corrective budget #1", "Corrective budget #2".
For this we have this database design : a Budget Table, a Version Budge with a foreign key between the two. the Version budget only contains an ID, a CODE and a LABEL.
Personnaly, I would like to remove this table. I don't see the advantages of this structure. And from the OO perspective, when I'm creating a budget I can query the databse to see if I need to create an Inital or Corrective budget (using a count query) then I can set the right enum to my new budget. But with the current design I need to query the database using the CODE that I want, select the ID and set the ID. So yes, it's really database oriented. Where is the DDD part ? a ValueObject is something that describe, quantify something. In my case seems good to me. A Version describe the current status of my Budget. I can comapre two versions just but checking their code, they don't have lifecycle (I don't want this one in particular).
How to you handle this type of usecases ?
It's only a simple example because I found that if you ask a database admin he would surely said that all seems good : using primary key, modeling relations, enforing constraints, using foreign key and avoid data duplication.
Thanks again Mike and Doctor for their comments.

I will hook in in your country example. In most cases, country will be a value object. There is nothing that will reference a country entity and that should know that if the values of the country changes it is still the same country. In fact, the country could be represented as an enum, and some nasty resource lookup functions that translate the Iso3 into a usefull display text. What we do is, we define it as a value object class with iso3, displayname and some other static information. Now out of this value object we define a kind of "power enum" (I still miss a standard term here). The class implementing the country value object gets a private constructor and static properties for each of its values (for each country) and explicit cast operators from and to int. Now you can treat it just like a normal enum of your programing language. The advantage to a normal enum beside having more property fields is, that it also can have methods (of course query methods, that don't change the state of the object). You can even use polymorphism (some countries with different behaviour than others). You could also load the content of the enums from a database table (without the statics then and a static lookupByIso3 method instead).
This you could make with some other "enum like" value objects, too. Imagine Currencies (it could have conversion methods that are implemented polymorphic). The handling of the daily exchange rates is a different topic though.
If the set of values is not fixed (for example another value object candidate like postal adress) then it is not a value object enum, but a standard value object that could be instantiated with the values you want.
To decide if you can live with something as a value object, you can use the following question: Do you want copy semantic, or reference semantic? If you ever change a property of the object, should all places where you used it update, too, or should they stay as they are? If the latter, than the "changed" object is a new and different value object. Another question would be, if you need to track changes to an object realizing that it remains the "same" despite of changing values. And if you have a value object, where you only want specific instances to exist, it is a kind of enum described above.
Does that somehow help you?

naming conventions when doing O/R mapping

I am mapping my database tables to my java objects. Generally I name my tables in the plural form in that a table holding books information is called BOOKS. The java object represents however one book and should be called Book. Similarly for AUTHORS/Author etc.
On the other hand, its kind of simplistic to give the same to the domain object and the table.
Is there some kind of naming convention that people follow? I guess this applies to applications in general and not just while doing O/R mapping.

Your initial thoughts are spot on.
Objects should be singular, as each object is individual.
Tables should be plural, as the table contains all.
Check out the naming conventions built into Ruby on Rails, they're relevant.

We use singular for table names and for OM classes. It makes more sense, to me, to say
person.last_name
than
people.last_name,
whether I'm writing SQL or Java (where, of course, it would be person.lastName, but you get the point).

I use SubSonic in my ASP.NET application, and I have it strip the plurals when naming the ActiveRecord classes. It's more a matter of style than a standard.
I prefer working with Invoice rather than Invoices because I'm usually dealing with 1 record at a time.

I usually just make sure i use the same standard everywhere, and also that i use logical names for my namings.
So Books become something like DbBooks, Authors becomes DbAuthors etc.

CJ Date does not use Plural names and neither should you. The only exception is the word "SALES". Other than that, use singular names.
compare
user.email = ? and account.value in (1,2,3)
to
users.email = ? and accounts.value in (1,2,3)
or (the worst option)
users.email = ? and account.values in (1,2,3)

jOOQ generates Java classes from your database schema. The classes modelling the tables will be called the same as the table itself, e.g.
AUTHOR > Author
BOOKS > Books
The classes modelling the objects (or records) will be suffixed with "Record":
AUTHOR > AuthorRecord
BOOKS > BooksRecord
That's pretty intuitive and generic, no matter what your tables are called. See
http://www.jooq.org

Persisting data suited for enums

Most projects have some sort of data that are essentially static between releases and well-suited for use as an enum, like statuses, transaction types, error codes, etc. For example's sake, I'll just use a common status enum:
public enum Status {
ACTIVE(10, "Active");
EXPIRED(11, "Expired");
/* other statuses... */
/* constructors, getters, etc. */
}
I'd like to know what others do in terms of persistence regarding data like these. I see a few options, each of which have some obvious advantages and disadvantages:
Persist the possible statuses in a status table and keep all of the possible status domain objects cached for use throughout the application
Only use an enum and don't persist the list of available statuses, creating a data consistency holy war between me and my DBA
Persist the statuses and maintain an enum in the code, but don't tie them together, creating duplicated data
My preference is the second option, although my DBA claims that our end users might want to access the raw data to generate reports, and not persisting the statuses would lead to an incomplete data model (counter-argument: this could be solved with documentation).
Is there a convention that most people use here? What are peoples' experiences with each and are there other alternatives?
Edit:
After thinking about it for a while, my real persistence struggle comes with handling the id values that are tied to the statuses in the database. These values would be inserted as default data when installing the application. At this point they'd have ids that are usable as foreign keys in other tables. I feel like my code needs to know about these ids so that I can easily retrieve the status objects and assign them to other objects. What do I do about this? I could add another field, like "code", to look stuff up by, or just look up statuses by name, which is icky.

We store enum values using some explicit string or character value in the database. Then to go from database value back to enum we write a static method on the enum class to iterate and find the right one.
If you expect a lot of enum values, you could create a static mapping HashMap<String,MyEnum> to translate quickly.
Don't store the actual enum name (i.e. "ACTIVE" in your example) because that's easily refactored by developers.

I'm using a blend of the three approaches you have documented...
Use the database as the authoritative source for the Enum values. Store the values in a 'code' table of some sort. Each time you build, generate a class file for the Enum to be included in your project.
This way, if the enum changes value in the database, your code will be properly invalidated and you will receive appropriate compile errors from your Continuous Integration server. You have a strongly typed binding to your enumerated values in the database, and you don't have to worry about manually syncing the values between code and the data.

Joshua Bloch gives an excellent explanation of enums and how to use them in his book "Effective Java, Second Edition" (p.147)
There you can find all sorts of tricks how to define your enums, persist them and how to quickly map them between the database and your code (p.154).
During a talk at the Jazoon 2007, Bloch gave the following reasons to use an extra attribute to map enums to DB fields and back: An enum is a constant but code isn't. To make sure that a developer editing the source can't accidentally break the DB mapping by reordering the enums or renaming then, you should add a specific attribute (like "dbName") to the enum and use that to map it.
Enums have an intrinsic id (which is used in the switch() statement) but this id changes when you change the order of elements (for example by sorting them or by adding elements in the middle).
So the best solution is to add a toDB() and fromDB() method and an additional field. I suggest to use short, readable strings for this new field, so you can decode a database dump without having to look up the enums.

While I am not familiar with the idea of "attributes" in Java (and I don't know what language you're using), I've generally used the idea of a code table (or domain specific tables) and I've attributed my enum values with more specific data, such as human readable strings (for instance, if my enum value is NewStudent, I would attribute it with "New Student" as a display value). I then use Reflection to examine the data in the database and insert or update records in order to bring them in line with my code, using the actual enum value as the key ID.

What I used in several occations is to define the enum in the code and a storage representation in the persistence layer (DB, file, etc.) and then have conversion methods to map them to each other. These conversion methods need only be used when reading from or writing to the persistent store and the application can use the type safe enums everywhere. In the conversion methods I used switch statements to do the mapping. This allows also to throw an exception if a new or unknown state is to be converted (usually because either the app or the data is newer than the other and new or additional states had been declared).

If there's at least a minor chance that list of values will need to be updated than it's 1. Otherwise, it's 3.

Well we don't have a DBA to answer to, so our preference is for option 2).
We simply save the Enum value into the database, and when we are loading data out of the database and into our Domain Objects, we just cast the integer value to the enum type.
This avoids any of the synchronisation headaches with options 1) and 3). The list is defined once - in the code.
However, we have a policy that nobody else accesses the database directly; they must come through our web services to access any data. So this is why it works well for us.

In your database, the primary key of this "domain" table does't have to be a number. Just use a varchar pk and a description column (for the purposes your dba is concerned). If you need to guarantee the ordering of your values without relying on the alphabetical sor, just add a numeric column named "order or "sequence".
In your code, create a static class with constants whose name (camel-cased or not) maps to the description and value maps to the pk. If you need more than this, create a class with the necessary structure and comparison operators and use instances of it as the value of the constants.
If you do this too much, build a script to generate the instatiation / declaration code.