Question

I need my enum to return a specific string, but I can’t work out how to make it return a string with breaks in it without having a method to do the conversion. Is it possible to make LicenseTypes.DISCOUNT_EARLY_ADOPTER return DISCOUNT EARLY-ADOPTER without the helper method?

// All license types
public enum LicenseTypes
{
    DISCOUNT,
    DISCOUNT_EARLY_ADOPTER,
    COMMERCIAL,
    COMMERCIAL_EARLY_ADOPTER
}

// Convert enum to correct string
public static string LicenseTypeToString(LicenseTypes Enum)
{
    if (Enum == LicenseTypes.COMMERCIAL)
        return "COMMERCIAL";
    else if (Enum == LicenseTypes.COMMERCIAL_EARLY_ADOPTER)
        return "COMMERCIAL EARLY-ADOPTER";
    else if (Enum == LicenseTypes.DISCOUNT)
        return "DISCOUNT";
    else if (Enum == LicenseTypes.DISCOUNT_EARLY_ADOPTER)
        return "DISCOUNT EARLY-ADOPTER";
    else
        return "ERROR";
}

Answer 1

Firstly, a separate option from a helper method is simply to have a Dictionary<LicenseTypes, string> which you populate once. That would probably be the simplest approach, to be honest:

private static readonly Dictionary<LicenseTypes, string> LicenseDesciptions =
    new Dictionary<LicenseTypes, string> 
{
    { LicenseTypes.COMMERCIAL, "COMMERCIAL" },
    { LicenseTypes.COMMERCIAL_EARLY_ADOPTER, "COMMERCIAL EARLY-ADOPTER" },
    { LicenseTypes.DOMESTIC, "DOMESTIC" },
    { LicenseTypes.DOMESTIC_EARLY_ADOPTER, "DOMESTIC EARLY-ADOPTER" },
};

(As noted in comments, another alternative is a switch/case… but I personally prefer this way, as effectively you’ve got a data mapping, so it makes sense to use a data structure rather than an execution flow structure. It also means you can swap out dictionaries for different languages etc if you want.)

Secondly, one option would be to decorate each enum value with a [Description] attribute (or your own attribute if you want), and find that out with reflection – Unconstrained Melody has an extension method which can do that very easily:

// Throws ArgumentOutOfRangeException if the licenseType value isn't defined
// or doesn't have a description.
string description = licenseType.GetDescription();

Also, following .NET naming conventions it should be:

public enum LicenseType // Singular as it's not a Flags enum
{
    Discount,
    DiscountEarlyAdopter,
    Commercial,
    CommercialEarlyAdopter
}