Question

Currently I have some buttons on my Winform that need to be disabled/enabled at various points depending what the user clicks.

The first draft I made was

button1.Enabled = false;
button2.Enabled = false;

To disable 2 buttons, which is obviously a horrible way of doing this, as there are currently a lot more than 2 and possibly more to come as this is still in development. So I need to have a way of easily changing a selection of buttons on the form.

Then I came up with this

private enum Buttons { Button1, Button2 } // etc with all buttons - that are named :)

private void DisableButtons(params Buttons[] buttons)
{
    foreach (Buttons button in buttons)
    {
        switch (button)
        {
            case Buttons.Button1:
                button1.Enabled = false;
                break;
            case Buttons.Button2:
                button2.Enabled = false;
                break;
        }
    }
}

Which I still wasn’t overly happy with. I could scrap the switch-case and foreach for

private void DisableButtons(params Buttons[] buttons)
{
    button1.Enabled = buttons.Contains(Buttons.Button1) ? false : true;
}

for each button but I just think there must be a better way.

Any ideas on how I could do this more efficiently?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can shorten your last code line to:

button1.Enabled = !buttons.Contains(Buttons.Button1);

Alternative solution

Or you can use the Tag property of each button to set a enum value for each button.

button1.Tag = Buttons.Button1;
button2.Tag = Buttons.Button2;
button3.Tag = Buttons.Button3;
// etc

Than you can do it for all buttons in a for loop:

var buttons = <all buttons, todo>
foreach (var button in buttons) {
    button.Enabled = !button.Contains((Buttons)button.Tag));
}