What is the "proper" way to cast Hibernate Query.list() to List<Type>?

Short answer @SuppressWarnings is the right way to go.

Long answer, Hibernate returns a raw List from the Query.list method, see here. This is not a bug with Hibernate or something the can be solved, the type returned by the query is not known at compile time.

Therefore when you write

final List<MyObject> list = query.list();

You are doing an unsafe cast from List to List<MyObject> - this cannot be avoided.

There is no way you can safely carry out the cast as the List could contain anything.

The only way to make the error go away is the even more ugly

final List<MyObject> list = new LinkedList<>();
for(final Object o : query.list()) {
    list.add((MyObject)o);
}

The resolution is to use TypedQuery instead. When creating a query from the EntityManager instead call it like this:

TypedQuery<[YourClass]> query = entityManager.createQuery("[your sql]", [YourClass].class);
List<[YourClass]> list = query.getResultList(); //no type warning

This also works the same for named queries, native named queries, etc. The corresponding methods have the same names as the ones that would return the vanilla query. Just use this instead of a Query whenever you know the return type.

You can avoid compiler warning with workarounds like this one:

List<?> resultRaw = query.list();
List<MyObj> result = new ArrayList<MyObj>(resultRaw.size());
for (Object o : resultRaw) {
    result.add((MyObj) o);
}

But there are some issues with this code:

• created superfluous ArrayList
• unnecessary loop over all elements returned from the query
• longer code.

And the difference is only cosmetic, so using such workarounds is - in my opinion - pointless.

You have to live with these warnings or suppress them.