Question

I’m trying to build an advanced search function in an app that builds a query based on a dataType.

My potential dataTypes are FLOAT, NUMBER, CHAR, VARCHAR2, DATE, TIMESTAMP(6)

I’m trying to “code out of my shell” and instead of using an ArrayList to store the values, i was going to try and use enum since i only have these 6 values and they never change.

TIMESTAMP(6) is giving me a hard time because of the parenthesis.

How can i declare an enum value TIMESTAMP(6)?

Currently the snippet below gives me the error: the constructor TableBacking.dataTypeOptions(int) is undefined.

public enum dataTypeOptions {
    FLOAT, NUMBER, CHAR, VARCHAR2, DATE, TIMESTAMP(6)
};

Answer 1

The enum constant names need to be valid identifiers. So you could call it TIMESTAMP_6 for example.

If you later need a string representation that returns TIMESTAMP(6) you can use a String constructor in your enum to define that value.

It could look like this:

public enum dataTypeOptions {

    FLOAT, NUMBER, CHAR, VARCHAR2, DATE, TIMESTAMP_6("TIMESTAMP(6)");
    private String stringRepresentation;

    dataTypeOptions() { //default behaviour, use the enum constant identifier
        this.stringRepresentation = this.name();
    }

    dataTypeOptions(String s) {
        this.stringRepresentation = s;
    }

    public String getStringRepresentation() {
        return stringRepresentation;
    }

};