Some properties are not type-cast correctly (or at all) during hydration of persistence layer objects from a database. The most important cases include:

• casting alwaysAvailable to a boolean,
• casting last (just) inserted id generated by a sequence to an integer,
• casting some other records returned by database fetches to integers.

Data returned by the database abstraction layer is DB driver-specific, so in all cases if the expected property type is not supposed to be a string, it should be cast.