Question

I have two lists of strings. One is object friendly name and other one is object class name.

"Car","Animal","Plane"

"MachineClass","AnimalClass","FlyClass".

I use friendly names to show user input and class names to dynamically create class instances by using reflection, so i need both lists and like you can see “Car” as friendly name can be bound to “Machine.cs”.

I need some more creative way of working and translating both of these lists rather than using switch statement which converts from one string to other, those lists have numerous items and i can make small spelling which will cause error. Moreover sometimes, i send string of test name for evaluation whereas same problem with spellings can apply there.

I tried to think about using enums but still digits doesn’t ring a bell for conversions between both lists.

Answer 1

 public enum Things
 {
     Car,
     Animal,
     Plane
 }

 var dict = new Dictionary<Things, string> {
      { Things.Car, "MachineClass" },
      { Things.Animal, "AnimalClass" },
      { Things.Plane, "FlyClass" } };

 string classname = dict[Things.Plane]; // FlyClass

Now if you wanted real types, that you can instantiate:

var realtypes = dict.ToDictionary(
        kvp => kvp.Key,
        kvp => System.Type.GetType("Namespace." + kvp.Value));

A fully working example is on http://ideone.com/TTuBP:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

//public interface IThing {} 
public class MachineClass /* : IThing */ { }
public class AnimalClass  /* : IThing */ { }
public class Plane        /* : IThing */ { }

public class Program
{
     public enum Things
     {
         Car,
         Animal,
         Plane
     }

     private static readonly IDictionary<Things, string> _classNameMap = 
         new Dictionary<Things, string> {
          { Things.Car,    "MachineClass" },
          { Things.Animal, "AnimalClass"  },
          { Things.Plane,  "FlyClass"     }  };

     public static void Main(string[] args)
     {
         var realtypes = _classNameMap.ToDictionary(
                 kvp => kvp.Key,
                 kvp => System.Type.GetType(/*"Namespace." +*/ kvp.Value));

         Type dynamicType = realtypes[Things.Plane]; // typeof(Namespace.FlyClass)

         foreach (var realtype in realtypes)
             Console.WriteLine("{0}, class {1}", 
                     realtype.Key, realtype.Value);
     }

}