How to use enums with JPA

Question

I have an existing database of a film rental system. Each film has a has a rating attribute. In SQL they used a constraint to limit the allowed values of this attribute.

Answer 1

public enum Rating {

    UNRATED ( "" ),
    G ( "G" ), 
    PG ( "PG" ),
    PG13 ( "PG-13" ),
    R ( "R" ),
    NC17 ( "NC-17" );

    private String rating;

    private static Map ratings = new HashMap();
    static {
        for (Rating r : EnumSet.allOf(Rating.class)) {
            ratings.put(r.toString(), r);
        }
    }

    private static Rating getRating(String rating) {
        return ratings.get(rating);
    }

    private Rating(String rating) {
        this.rating = rating;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return rating;
    }
}

I don't know how to do the mappings in the annotated TopLink side of things however.