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.

CONSTRAINT film_rating_check CHECK 
    ((((((((rating)::text = ''::text) OR 
          ((rating)::text = 'G'::text)) OR 
          ((rating)::text = 'PG'::text)) OR 
          ((rating)::text = 'PG-13'::text)) OR 
          ((rating)::text = 'R'::text)) OR 
          ((rating)::text = 'NC-17'::text)))

I think it would be nice to use a Java enum to map the constraint into the object world. But it's not possible to simply take the allowed values because of the special char in "PG-13" and "NC-17". So I implemented the following enum:

public enum Rating {

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

    private String rating;

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

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

@Entity
public class Film {
    ..
    @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
    private Rating rating;
    ..

With the toString() method the direction enum -> String works fine, but String -> enum does not work. I get the following exception:

[TopLink Warning]: 2008.12.09 01:30:57.434--ServerSession(4729123)--Exception [TOPLINK-116] (Oracle TopLink Essentials - 2.0.1 (Build b09d-fcs (12/06/2007))): oracle.toplink.essentials.exceptions.DescriptorException Exception Description: No conversion value provided for the value [NC-17] in field [FILM.RATING]. Mapping: oracle.toplink.essentials.mappings.DirectToFieldMapping[rating-->FILM.RATING] Descriptor: RelationalDescriptor(de.fhw.nsdb.entities.Film --> [DatabaseTable(FILM)])

cheers

timo

Answer 1

have you tried to store the ordinal value. Store the string value works fine if you don't have an associated String to the value:

@Enumerated(EnumType.ORDINAL)