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I have a table in my database called “OrderItemType” which has about 5 records for the different OrderItemTypes in my system. Each OrderItem contains an OrderItemType, and this gives me referential integrity. In my middletier code, I also have an enum which matches the values in this table so that I can have business logic for the different types.
My dev manager says he hates it when people do this, and I am not exactly sure why. Is there a better practice I should be following?
I do this all the time and I see nothing wrong with this. The fact of the matter is, there are values that are special to your application and your code needs to react differently to those values. Would your manager rather you hard-code an Int or a GUID to identify the Type? Or would he rather you derive a special object from OrderItem for each different Type in the database? Both of those suck much worse than an enum.