Question

Is there a best practice for enumerations in java? For example, I have the following:

class Foo {

    public static final int OPTION_1 = 'a';
    public static final int OPTION_2 = 'b';

    public void doSomething(String name, int option) {
       ...
    }
}

void test() {
    Foo foo = new Foo();
    foo.doSomething("blah", Foo.OPTION_2);
}

so the user can choose to use one of the static ints defined in Foo, but they could also supply any other int they want, there’s no compile-time checking on it. Is there some way around this in java, some other way of doing this to restrict the end developer to choose from only the defined option types?

Thanks

Answer 1

class Foo {
    public enum Option{First, Second}
    public void doSomething(String name, Option option) {
       ...
    }
}

void test() {
    Foo foo = new Foo();
    foo.dosomething("blah", Foo.Option.Second);
}