Skip to main content

C# Snippet Tutorial - How to Get an Enum from a Number [Beginner]


To continue our snippet tutorial series, here's a quick tutorial on how to convert an integer to an enum. This is useful when you've got a number, either from a file or transferred over a socket, and you want to convert that number to an enum.

What we're going to create is a generic method that can convert a number to any type of enum. I like using a generic method for this because now I can convert numbers to any type of enum using the same function and without having to cast the return value for each enum separately.

Here's the function that will be doing all the work:
public T NumToEnum<T>(int number)
{
   return (T)Enum.ToObject(typeof(T), number);
}
 
This is a generic function that can convert a number to any type of enum. Let's see some sample code that makes use of this function. First, let's create some enums.
public enum DaysOfWeek
{
   Monday,
   Tuesday,
   Wednesday,
   Thursday,
   Friday,
   Saturday,
   Sunday
}

public enum MonthsInYear
{
   January,
   February,
   March,
   April,
   May,
   June,
   July,
   August,
   September,
   October,
   November,
   December
}
 
Now, let's see some code that uses NumToEnum.
int day = 3;
int month = 10;

DaysOfWeek d  = NumToEnum<DaysOfWeek>(day);
//d is now DaysOfWeek.Thursday

MonthsInYear m = NumToEnum<MonthsInYear>(month);
//m is now MonthsInYear.November
 
I know this is something I've needed on several occasions, so hopefully this will help you out as well.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

C# Snippet - Shuffling a Dictionary [Beginner]

Randomizing something can be a daunting task, especially with all the algorithms out there. However, sometimes you just need to shuffle things up, in a simple, yet effective manner. Today we are going to take a quick look at an easy and simple way to randomize a dictionary, which is most likely something that you may be using in a complex application. The tricky thing about ordering dictionaries is that...well they are not ordered to begin with. Typically they are a chaotic collection of key/value pairs. There is no first element or last element, just elements. This is why it is a little tricky to randomize them. Before we get started, we need to build a quick dictionary. For this tutorial, we will be doing an extremely simple string/int dictionary, but rest assured the steps we take can be used for any kind of dictionary you can come up with, no matter what object types you use. Dictionary < String , int > origin = new Dictionary < string , int >(); ...

C# WPF Printing Part 2 - Pagination [Intermediate]

About two weeks ago, we had a tutorial here at SOTC on the basics of printing in WPF . It covered the standard stuff, like popping the print dialog, and what you needed to do to print visuals (both created in XAML and on the fly). But really, that's barely scratching the surface - any decent printing system in pretty much any application needs to be able to do a lot more than that. So today, we are going to take one more baby step forward into the world of printing - we are going to take a look at pagination. The main class that we will need to do pagination is the DocumentPaginator . I mentioned this class very briefly in the previous tutorial, but only in the context of the printing methods on PrintDialog , PrintVisual (which we focused on last time) and PrintDocument (which we will be focusing on today). This PrintDocument function takes a DocumentPaginator to print - and this is why we need to create one. Unfortunately, making a DocumentPaginator is not as easy as...

C# WPF Tutorial - Implementing IScrollInfo [Advanced]

The ScrollViewer in WPF is pretty handy (and quite flexible) - especially when compared to what you had to work with in WinForms ( ScrollableControl ). 98% of the time, I can make the ScrollViewer do what I need it to for the given situation. Those other 2 percent, though, can get kind of hairy. Fortunately, WPF provides the IScrollInfo interface - which is what we will be talking about today. So what is IScrollInfo ? Well, it is a way to take over the logic behind scrolling, while still maintaining the look and feel of the standard ScrollViewer . Now, first off, why in the world would we want to do that? To answer that question, I'm going to take a an example from a tutorial that is over a year old now - Creating a Custom Panel Control . In that tutorial, we created our own custom WPF panel (that animated!). One of the issues with that panel though (and the WPF WrapPanel in general) is that you have to disable the horizontal scrollbar if you put the panel in a ScrollV...