Question

I am writing a program to simulate cities from a game called Civilization 4. In order to do this I have several Enums to represent types of terrain, resources, improvements etc for each plot owned by said city.

The problem is I want to program to be compatible with Fan made mods which may add things to the Game that need to be accepted into my independant utility. So I thought of creating a Enum style class to hold the new types defined by the loaded mods (as Enums cannot be changed at runtime) which is created during runtime when the user enters in a mod to be loaded (which is a txt file that is parsed to read the new additions)

So is there a way to simulate Enums that are created and added to at runtime? I take it static member variables cannot be used as they are done before runtime…

Answer 1

You can make a enum implement an interface.

This way you can have your defined values in the enum, but new values can be any class which implements the interface.

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An alternative is that you generate or load the enum at runtime using a byte code generator or the Compiler API. I wrote a library to make it easier to take a String and compile&load it.

http://vanillajava.blogspot.co.uk/2010_11_01_archive.html