Is using an Enum the best way to go for listing different "Types of Car".

Question

I have an attribute in my car class called VehicleType.

Using an enum, I could list the different types of cars that exist and not allow any other type to be hard written in.

Problem is, if I have to GET the attribute from somewhere else, I will GET a numberical value, and not the string literal I saved.

What should I use here?

class Hero
{
    public string faction;
    public string name;
    public string herotype;

    enum HeroType
    {
        Agility,
        Strength,
        Intelligence,
    }
}

Answer 1

You could create an abstract base class

public abstract class BaseHero
{
    public string faction;
    public string name;
    ...... more properties
} 

and then derive your heroes from that:

public class AgilityHero : BaseHero
{
} 

public class StrengthHero : BaseHero
{
} 

public class IntelligenceHero : BaseHero
{
} 

Common stuff would be handled and coded in the base class, those things specific to a hero type in the actual hero class.

Using this OO approach, you can save yourself from having to write, code, maintain a lot of if....then.....else or switch statements in your Hero class - the differences are handled by the fact of having different types for each type of hero.

Answer 2

What? Why would you have a string literal and an enum? Your class should look like this:

class Hero
{
    public string faction;
    public string name;
    public HeroType herotype; // <-- not a string

    enum HeroType
    {
        Agility,
        Strength,
        Intelligence,
    }
}

The "string" version is just the enum so it's easier for you to remember, but shouldn't actually be saved as a string anywhere (except if you need to display it to the user).

Answer 3

What I sometimes do for modeling richer 'enumeration-like' types is the following:

public enum HeroTypeValue
{
    Agility,
    Strength,
    Intelligence   
}


public class HeroType
{
    public HeroTypeValue Value { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }

    // ... other properties and possibly behaviour, as needed

    public static HeroType Agility = new HeroType 
                           { 
                              ID = HeroTypeValue.Agility, 
                              Description = "Agility" 
                           },

    public static HeroType Strength = new HeroType
                           { 
                              ID = HeroTypeValue.Strength, 
                              Description = "Agility" 
                           };

    public static HeroType Intelligence = new HeroType 
                           { 
                              ID = HeroTypeValue. Intelligence, 
                              Description = "Intelligence" 
                           };

    public static IEnumerable<HeroType> All = new [] 
    {
        Agility,
        Strength,
        Intelligence
    }
}

This allows to do data binding with easily customizable descriptions, when needed you can also synchronize with a table in the database.

You can of course combine it with the answer by marc_s, making the HeroType a (abstract or not) base class for added OO value.

Answer 4

Whether an enum is approriate depends entirely on your design. If you have a fixed number of possible values, then an enum may be a good approach.

In C# you can convert between an Enumerated type and its string representation using Enum.ToString() and Enum.Parse(), so it is trivially easy to serialise an enum's value and disallow "illegal" values when reloading the data. There is no need to serialise it as an integer value.

(The one caveat of this is if you use obfuscation, you must make sure not to obfuscate the enumerated type)

If you have to store the enum as an integer value, then there is no problem with that, as long as you don't change the values of the enum entries - add new entries at the end of the enum's list, but don't insert new entries in the middle of it.