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

What about this

public String getRating{  
   return rating.toString();
}

pubic void setRating(String rating){  
   //parse rating string to rating enum
   //JPA will use this getter to set the values when getting data from DB   
}  

@Transient  
public Rating getRatingValue(){  
   return rating;
}

@Transient  
public Rating setRatingValue(Rating rating){  
   this.rating = rating;
}

with this you use the ratings as String both on your DB and entity, but use the enum for everything else.