Question

I’m not sure if I am abusing Enums here. Maybe this is not the best design approach.

I have a enum which declares the possible parameters to method which executes batch files.

public enum BatchFile
{
    batch1,
    batch2
}

I then have my method:

public void ExecuteBatch(BatchFile batchFile)
{
    string batchFileName;
    ...
    switch (batchFile)
        {
            case BatchFile.batch1:
                batchFileName = "Batch1.bat";
                break;
            case BatchFile.batch2:
                batchFileName = "Batch2.bat";
                break;
            default:
                break;
        }
    ...
    ExecuteBatchFile(batchFileName);
}

So I was wondering if this is sound design.

Another option I was thinking was creating a Dictionary<> in the constructor like this:

Dictionary<BatchFile, String> batchFileName = new Dictionary<BatchFile, string>();
batchFileName.Add(BatchFile.batch1, "batch1.bat");
batchFileName.Add(BatchFile.batch2, "batch2.bat");

Then instead of using a switch statement I would just go:

public void ExecuteBatch(BatchFile batchFile)
{
    ExecuteBatchFile(batchFileName[batchFile]);
}

I’m guessing the latter is the better approach.

Answer 1

I’d probably go for a design along these lines:

public interface IBatchFile
{
    void Execute();
}

public class BatchFileType1 : IBatchFile
{
    private string _filename;

    public BatchFileType1(string filename)
    {
        _filename = filename;
    }

    ...

    public void Execute()
    {
        ...
    }
}

public class BatchFileType2 : IBatchFile
{
    private string _filename;

    public BatchFileType2(string filename)
    {
        _filename = filename;
    }

    ...

    public void Execute()
    {
        ...
    }
}

In fact, I’d extract any common functionality into a BatchFile base class