Question

In my database I have tables that define types for example

Table: Publication Types

  ID | Type ---------- 1  | Article 2  | Abstract 3  | Book .... 

Which is related through the ID key to a publication tables which has the field TypeID.

I then create a PublicationTable data table my .NET application which I want to filter based on the publication type. For example the following function gives me the number of publications for a specific author and publication type.

      Public Function countPublications(ByVal authorID As Integer, _                                        ByVal publicationType As Integer) As Integer          Dim authPubs As New PublicationsDataSet.tblPublicationsDataTable         authPubs = Me.getAuthorsPublications(authorID)          Dim dv As New DataView(authPubs)         dv.RowFilter = 'status='published' AND type='' + _                         publicationType.ToString + '''          Return dv.Count      End Function  

To call this function to get a count of articles by an author of a specific type, I could

1. call the function with two integers

   countPublications(authorID, 1)

2. setup an enum so that I can write

   countPublications(authorID, pubType.Article)

   or

3. somehow use the publication type table to filter the publication data set but I haven’t got my head around how to do this.

What other approaches should I consider.

Thanks

Answer 1

if publication types are essentially static, enums are fine

there is arguably little difference between embedding

inner join lookuptable lt on lt.id = (int)myenum.sometype  

in a query and adding

inner join lookuptable lt on lt.name = 'somehardcodeddescription' 

they’re both embedded constants, the former just has a well-defined type behind it

alternately you could use

inner join lookuptable lt on lt.name = myenum.sometype.ToString 

i prefer the former

if, on the other hand, new lookup types may be added after the code is deployed, then an enum will quickly become outdated;

but if there is core set of static enum values that the code needs and the rest don’t matter then the former solution is still fine

as usual, ‘it depends’ 😉