Question

I’ve got an Enum with Flags attribute.

  [Flags]
    public enum AlcoholStatus
    {
        NotRecorded = 1,
        Drinker = 2,
        NonDrinker = 4
    }

I am creating a Sqlparameter as below.

new SqlParameter("@AlcoholStatus", SqlDbType.VarChar) {Value = (int) AlcoholStatus}

If AlcoholStatus has all the values (NotRecorded | Drinker | NonDrinker) it returns 7 as the value for the SqlParameter.

I am parsing this parameter for a stored procedure and I prefer if I can parse the value as “1,2,3,”. What’s the best way of doing this?

Or is there any other easy way to filter records by parsing integer value 7 to the stored procedure?

EDIT : This happens in a filter functionally where user wants to see people with any of above statuses.
It’s a quite complicated sql query. There I filter AlcoholStatus as below

WHERE AlcoholStatus IN "1,2,4,"

Answer 1

I wrote below method to get the comma separated enum ids in order to parse that to the database.

private static string GetAlcoholStatuses(Enums.Enums.AlcoholStatus? alcoholStatus)
{
    if (alcoholStatus == null)
        return string.Empty;

    Enums.Enums.AlcoholStatus alcoholStatusValue = alcoholStatus.Value;
    string alcoholStatuses = string.Empty;

    if (alcoholStatusValue.HasFlag(Enums.Enums.AlcoholStatus.Drinker))
    {
        alcoholStatuses = string.Format("{0}{1}{2}", alcoholStatuses, (int)Enums.Enums.AlcoholStatus.Drinker, ",");
    }
    if (alcoholStatusValue.HasFlag(Enums.Enums.AlcoholStatus.NonDrinker))
    {
        alcoholStatuses = string.Format("{0}{1}{2}", alcoholStatuses, (int)Enums.Enums.AlcoholStatus.NonDrinker, ",");
    }
    if (alcoholStatusValue.HasFlag(Enums.Enums.AlcoholStatus.NotRecorded))
    {
        alcoholStatuses = string.Format("{0}{1}{2}", alcoholStatuses, (int)Enums.Enums.AlcoholStatus.NotRecorded, ",");
    }

    return alcoholStatuses;
}