Question

I have created an enum and I’m trying to allow my enum to support a String.format operation that gets unlimited number of parameters are return a string.
I only managed to return an object and after using this method I have to do a toString()/casting. I am guessing there’s a more “clean” way to do it, or maybe to override better the toString() method. Basically, I wanted to support the toString() method but sadly didn’t manage to do that so I created this method. As you can see it’s named text(..) and not toString().

How can I do this better? The ideal solution I wanted was something like toString(..) which returns a String.

public enum MY_ENUM {

    VALUE_A("aaa %s"), VALUE_B("bbb %s");

    private String text;

    MY_ENUM(String text) {
        this.text = text;
    }

    public String text() {
        return this.text;
    }

    public Object text(final Object... o) {
        return new Object() {
            @Override
            public String toString() {
                return String.format(text(), o);
            }
        };
    }
}

Answer 1

I see where you’re going… I think this is what you want (tested, and it works):

public String toString(Object... o) {
    return String.format(text, o);
}

For a design point of view, I would not publish the text (ie have the getter) unless you really need to – the fact that text is used as a format string is an implementation choice. I would simply do this:

public static enum MY_ENUM {

    VALUE_A("aaa %s bbb %s"),
    VALUE_B("bbb %s");

    private final String text;

    MY_ENUM(String text) {
        this.text = text;
    }

    public String toString(Object... o) {
        return String.format(text, o);
    }
}

As an aside, I really like the idea of the class. Haven’t seen it before.