Convert from enum ordinal to enum type

Question

Hi,

I've an enum type: ReportTypeEnum that get passed between methods in all my classes but I then need to pass this on the URL so I use the ordinal method to get the int value. After I get it in my other JSP page I need to convert it to back to an ReportTypeEnum so that I can continue passing it.

How can I convert ordinal to the ReportTypeEnum?

Using Java 6 EE.

Answer 1

ReportTypeEnum value = ReportTypeEnum.values()[ordinal]

Answer 2

This is almost certainly a bad idea. Certainly if the ordinal is de-facto persisted (e.g. because someone has bookmarked the URL) - it means that you must always preserve the enum ordering in future, which may not be obvious to code maintainers down the line.

Why not encode the enum using myEnumValue.name() (and decode via ReportTypeEnum.valueOf(s)) instead?