I’ve recently found myself needing (yes, needing) to define absurdly long switch statements and enum declarations in C# code, but I’m wondering what people feel is the best way to split them into logical subsections. In my situation, both the enum values and the cases (which are based on the enum values) have fairly clear groupings, yet I am slightly unsure how to reflect this in code.
Note that in my code, I have roughly 5 groups of between 10 and 30 enum values/cases each.
The three vaguely sensible options I can envisage are:
- Define
#regionblocks around all logical groups of cases/enum values within the declaration (optionally separated by blank lines). - Comment each group with it’s name, with a blank line before each group name comment.
- Do nothing whatsoever – simply leave the switch/enum as a huge list of cases/values.
Which do you prefer? Would you treat enums and switches separately? (This would seem slightly odd to me.) Now, I wouldn’t say that there is any right/wrong answer to this question, though I would nonetheless be quite interested in hearing what the general consenus of views is.
Note 1: This situation where I might potentially have an extremely long enum declaration of 50/100+ values is unfortunately unavoidable (and similarly with the switch), since I am attempting to write a lexer (tokeniser), and this would thus seem the most reasonable approach for several reasons.
Note 2: I am fully aware that several duplicate questions already exist on the question of whether to use regions in general code (for structuring classes, mainly), but I feel my question here is much more specific and hasn’t yet been addressed.
Sure, region those things up. They probably don’t change much, and when they do, you can expand the region, make your changes, collapse it, and move on to the rest of the file.
They are there for a reason, use them to your advantage.