Enum Extensions

History

There were many times where I had to display the string value of an enum instead of numeric value. Because the built-in ToString() returns an ugly looking string I prefered not to use it and started to find if there is something better. I ran into some blog post on attribues and their usage. So I decided to use attributes to specify what I want to show as string representation of an enum.

Later when I ran into a stackoverflow question that needed the same mechanism. One of the commenters made a great point about localization. So I thought of expanding my code a little bit more and made it a PCL (Portable Class Library), so it can be used in crossplatform .Net situation.

Thought

The idea was to have an enum value be able to have an attribute called StringValue. This attribute should work in a way that one should be able to either specify a literal text to display or should be able to give a reference to a data value pair in a resource file. So the attribute should have two constructors, where one takes just the string, the other takes a key name and namespace for a resource file entry.

Usage

Declaring the Enum

	public enum TestEnum
	{
		[StringValue("From Attribute")]
		FromAttribute = 1,
		[StringValue("Test", "EnumExtensions.Tests.Resources")]
		FromResource = 2,
		BuiltInToString = 3
	}

When you need to show the string value.

	//Get the string value...
	TestEnum.FromResource.GetStringValue();