passing an "unknown enumeration" to a method

Question

I'm currently trying to make a class that can register strings as identifiers and accociate them with different types of Enumerations, these enumerations are being evaluated only in so much that I am ensuring that when it's used, that the parameter passed to broadcast (messageType) is an instance of the associated Enum Type.

This would work something like this:

Diagnostics.RegisterIdentifier("logger", typeof(TestEnum));
Diagnostics.Broadcast("logger", TestEnum.Info, null, "Hello World", null);

here's the code I currently have, I need to be able to verify that messageTypesEnum is contained in messageTypesFromIdentifier.

private static Dictionary<string, Type> identifierMessageTypeMapping = new Dictionary<string, Type>();
    private static List<IListener> listeners = new List<IListener>();

    public static void RegisterIdentifier(string identifier, Type messageTypesEnum)
    {
        if (messageTypesEnum.BaseType.FullName == "System.Enum")
        {
            identifierMessageTypeMapping.Add(identifier, messageTypesEnum);
        }
        else
        {
            throw new ArgumentException("Expected type of messageTypesEnum to derive from System.Enum", "messageTypesEnum");
        }
    }



    public static void Broadcast(string identifier, object messageType, string metaIdentifier, string message, Exception exception)
    {
        if (identifierMessageTypeMapping.ContainsKey(identifier))
        {
            Type messageTypesFromIdentifier = identifierMessageTypeMapping[identifier];
            foreach (var listener in listeners)
            {
                DiagnosticsEvent writableEvent = new DiagnosticsEvent(identifier, messageType, metaIdentifier, message, exception);
                listener.Write(writableEvent);
            }
        }
    }

Answer 1

It looks like Generics might be useful for what you're trying to do. Then you could combine the calls into something like

Diagnostics.Broadcast<TestEnum>("logger", TestEnum.Info, null, "Hello World", null);