I’ve looked at a number of similiar questions on Stack Overflow to no avail. I have a pretty simple scenario where I would like to use an AttributeConverter to convert an Enum to a numeric code in the database. My enum class is:

public enum DispatchStage {
    STAGE_0_DISPATCH_INIT(0),
    STAGE_25_VERIFIED(25),
    STAGE_100_DONE(100);

    private final int code;

    DispatchStage(int code) {
        this.code = code;
    }

    public int getCode() {
        return code;
    }
}

Which is a member of this class:

@Data
public class DocumentDispatch {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    Long id;

    @Convert(converter = DispatchStageConverter.class)
    DispatchStage dispatchStage = DispatchStage.STAGE_0_DISPATCH_INIT;

}

And I’ve created the following attribute converter:

@Converter(autoApply = true)
public class DispatchStageConverter implements AttributeConverter<DispatchStage, Integer>  {
    @Override
    public Integer convertToDatabaseColumn(DispatchStage stage) {
        System.out.println("USING CONVERTER");
        return stage.getCode();
    }

    @Override
    public DispatchStage convertToEntityAttribute(Integer code) {
        System.out.println("USING CONVERTER");
        for (DispatchStage stage : DispatchStage.values()) {
            if (stage.getCode() == code) {
                return stage;
            }
        }
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Unknown code: " + code);
    }
}

I have jpa and jakarta.persistence in my pom.xml, and yet the attribute converter is never invoked when I save DocumentDispatch to the DB. The system outs don’t appear in the log, and I get a sql error for trying to save a string to an int field. I’ve tried a number of suggestions and ideas, but there’s no sign of Spring employing my converter at all. Is there some really obvious mistake I’m making, or is there a way to debug this?