Question

Here is what i am trying to do.

I have two bit fields in my database:

Archived(bit)
Deleted(bit)

What i would like to do is calculate a int depending on their vaules.

As an example, this would be in my model:

class Person {

Int32 Status {get;set;}

}

If Archived = true set the status to 1,

If Deleted = true set the status to 2,

If both are false, set the status to 0.

I want to do this with out using If statements, maybe there is some sort of boolean arithmetic that i can use?

Answer 1

Why don’t use an enum?

[Flags]
public enum PersonState
{
    None = 0,
    Archived = 1,
    Deleted = 2,
    Both = Archived | Deleted
}

class Person
{
    private PersonState status;

    public PersonState Status
    {
        get { return this.status; }
        set { this.status = value; }
    }

    public bool IsArchived
    {
        get
        {
            return (this.status & PersonState.Archived) != 0;
        }
        set
        {
            if (value)
                this.status |= PersonState.Archived;
            else
                this.status &= ~PersonState.Archived;
        }
    }

    public bool IsDeleted
    {
        get
        {
            return (this.status & PersonState.Deleted) != 0;
        }
        set
        {
            if (value)
                this.status |= PersonState.Deleted;
            else
                this.status &= ~PersonState.Deleted;
        }
    }
}

You can directly cast an enum value to integer.

int x = (int)person.Status;

And you can do the contrary, if you have an int.

person.Status = (PersonState)integerValue;

Also if you don’t provide the possibility that Deleted and Archived can coexists together this is actually a possibility with booleans.
The number of possible values encoded by n boolean values is 2^n, so, since you have 2 booleans, you have 4 possible values, 00, 01, 10 and 11.

The problem is in the problem itself: it is wrong to encode that information with booleans. It should be an enum with only 3 possible values also in the DB.