Enum with attributes
Recently I came across an implementation where enum is converted to string and vice versa (http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2004/04/02/106310.aspx ). The disadvantage here is that, say you want get the string for something like this “Not available”.
enum Status {
Not_Available,
Available_For_Game,
Available_For_Discussion
}
The string conversion here for the first one would yield Not_Available. This is not desirable in some cases where you don’t want the “_”. A better implementation would be to create attributes to this enum and then extract this.
public enum Status {
[Status(Description = "Not Available")]
Not_Available = 1,
[Status(Description = "Available For Game")]
Available_For_Game = 2,
[Status(Description = "Available For Discussion")]
Available_For_Discussion = 3,
}
public class StatusEnumInfo {
private static StatusAttribute[] edesc;
public static String GetDescription(object e)
{
System.Reflection.FieldInfo f = e.GetType().GetField(e.ToString());
StatusEnumInfo.edesc = f.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(StatusAttribute), false) as StatusAttribute[];
if (StatusEnumInfo.edesc != null && StatusEnumInfo.edesc.Length == 1)
return StatusEnumInfo.edesc[0].Description;
else
return String.Empty;
}
public static object GetEnumFromDesc(Type t, string desc)
{
Array x = Enum.GetValues(t);
foreach (object o in x) {
if (GetDescription(o).Equals(desc)) {
return o;
}
} return String.Empty;
}
}
public class StatusAttribute : Attribute {
public String Description { get; set; }
}
public class Implemenation {
public void Run()
{
Status statusEnum = (Status)StatusEnumInfo.GetEnumFromDesc(typeof(Status), "Not Available");
String statusString = StatusEnumInfo.GetDescription(Status.Available_For_Discussion);
}
}
You are of course free to generalize this. Correct me if this is not a correct implementation.