Question

Okay, here’s what I’m attempting.

I have a drop down list with all of the countries in the world.
The user selects one, and that value is passed to a case statement,
if it matches the case, an email is sent.

I only have four different recipents, but I can have upwards to dozens
of countries to match with each one of the four emails. For example:

switch (selectedCountry)
{
    case "ca":
        sendTo = canadaEmail;
        break;
    case "uk":
    case "de":
    case "fr"
        sendTo = europeanEmail;
        break;
    case "bb":                
        sendTo = barbadosEmail;
        break;
    default:
        sendTo = usEmail;
        break;
}

What I would like to know is, what’s a better way of doing this rather than having
one huge case statement?

Answer 1

You can’t get around the fact that somewhere, somehow, you’ll have to enumerate the countries and assign them to an email address. You could do that in any number of ways, be it a database, an external XML file, or an internal List object.

For example:

List<string> europeanEmailCountries = new List<string>();
europeanEmailCountries.AddRange("fr", "de"); // etc

...

if(europeanEmailCountries.Contains(countryCode))
{
    sendTo = europeanEmailAddress;
}

This saves you the convoluted switch statement by allowing you to define a list of countries mapped to a particular email address, without going through each potential entry. I might be inclined to populate the list from an XML file instead of hardcoding the values, though.