Representing types in creational db code

[Horatio Westock]

I'm looking for wisdom on the following situation.

I have a fairly standard situation where one table in the database references another, with the latter table representing a set of type values.

I have DAOs representing records from both tables, and I'm trying to work out the best way of using the types in a creational sense.

For example,

Record r = new Record();
... populate fields
recordDAO.insert(r);

Now, in my business logic, there may be a requirement to create records of a certain type. For example,

r.setType( Type.getByUID( Type.STANDARD_TYPE ) );

As you can see, at the moment I am using some enumerated fields in Type DAO to correlate to unique values in the underlying table. These are guaranteed unique character identifiers.

This doesn't feel right. Of course I can factor out the UIDs to a configuration file, but this doesn't change the fact that the code still needs to know how to create a "STANDARD_TYPE".

Any suggestions of a better approach to this, without changing my current persistance layer entirely?