Question

A User in my system can have Email, Mobile or Phone and based on the values passed I am checking some conditions and then setting the ContactDataStatus (which is an enum) for each. I am then checking the ContactDataStatus to determine whether the provided contact details were valid.

The enum has the following definition

public enum ContactDataStatus
    {
        ExistsButUnverified = 1, 
        ExisitsAndVerified = 2, 
        IsValid = 3, 
        IsUninitialized = 4
    }

I wrote the following if conditions to set isValid variable

    isValid = false;
    if (emailStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsValid && 
       (mobileStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsValid || 
        mobileStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsUninitialized) 
        && (phoneStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsValid || 
        phoneStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsUninitialized))
    {
        isValid = true;
    }
    else if (mobileStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsValid && 
    (emailStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsValid || 
    emailStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsUninitialized) && 
    (phoneStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsValid || 
    phoneStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsUninitialized))
    {
       isValid = true;
    }
    else if (phoneStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsValid && 
    (emailStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsValid || 
    emailStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsUninitialized) && 
    (mobileStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsValid || 
    mobileStatus == ContactDataStatus.IsUninitialized))
    {
      isValid = true;
    }

Is there a simpler/shorter way of writing this?

Answer 1

It would help if you told us what the values were for the enum. It sounds like you want at least one of the values to be valid, and all of the values to either be uninitialized or valid. So one way of expressing that would be:

var statuses = new[] { emailStatus, mobileStatus, phoneStatus };
bool valid = statuses.Any(x => x == ContactDataStatus.IsValid) &&
             statuses.All(x => x == ContactDataStatus.IsValid ||
                               x == ContactDataStatus.IsUninitialized);

Or if the status enum is just IsValid, IsUninitialized and (say) IsInvalid, and you knew that the values would actually be in that set, you could write:

var statuses = new[] { emailStatus, mobileStatus, phoneStatus };
bool valid = statuses.Any(x => x == ContactDataStatus.IsValid) &&
             statuses.All(x => x != ContactDataStatus.IsInvalid);

Also, I’d suggest that you removed the “is” prefix from each of the enum values – it’s just fluff which makes the code harder to read IMO.