struts vs ibatis - Integer type

[Darek Dober]

Hi,   I hava a table  'users' with column dept_id (id of department in departments table)   This column is optional. That means the operator doesn't have to assign inserted user to any department.   If I have bean:   public class UserBean {     Integer departmentId;       .... }   struts will make automatic conversion of type. So departmentId will be set to 0, if I don't set any of department. That's a cheat, because,  I don't want to to have a department with id equals to 0, it should be NULL.   On the other hand, when I implement departmentId as String, struts act correctly. But while inserting record to the database, I get an error sth like this: database column dept_id is type of bigint, inserted value is type of varchar.   I have the solution: departmentId is type of String, but for ibatis I have the other metod getDepartmentIdAsInteger which return Integer or null if value is empty. It works, but i don't like this.   Is there any cleaner solution for this. I looked into jpetstore, but there were columns of type varchar. Rest of them was mendatory. I cannot use columns of type varchar as foreign keys.   Usage: .... VALUES(      #departmentId:INTEGER#, ....   doesn't help if departmentId is String   Any ideas?   Darek