Enum-like class

Question

I am looking for a best practice on how to create enum-like class that instead of numbers contains string values. Something like this:

public static class CustomerType
{
  public static string Type1 = "Customer Type 1";
  public static string Type2 = "Customer Type 2";
}

I would use this class throughout application as a value for all cases where I need CustomerType. I cannot use Enum because this is legacy system, and values like this are hardcoded everywhere, I am just trying to centralize them in one place.

Question is, in above example, should I use for declaring a variable:

static read-only keyword
const keyword
or just static

What would be a best practice to set these kinds of classes and values?

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3190870/const-string-vs-static-string-in-c-sharp. — nneonneo, Feb 19 '13 at 07:01

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 19 '13 at 07:07

You should not use plain static because the fields could be inadvertently modified and cause mysterious breakage. Therefore, your two choices are static readonly and const.

const will cause the variable's value to be embedded in the calling code at compile-time, which would be effectively equivalent to the old hardcoded code (but with the advantage of a symbolic constant). The danger of const is that you must recompile everything if a const changes, lest you end up with out-of-sync constants and tricky bugs.

static readonly will result in a normal field access, so you won't have synchronization issues. However, you may take a slight performance hit due to the extra field access (though it is likely to be unnoticeable unless you use these fields a lot in performance-critical code). If you think you will have to change the strings at some point in the future, you will want to use static readonly.

From the sounds of it, the values will change rarely enough that const is a safe bet. However, the ultimate decision is up to you.

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:46

3

If you are using C#, Why not create an enum and set string based Description attribute for the enum values as below:

public enum CustomerType
{
    [System.ComponentModel.Description("Customer Type 1")]
    Type1,

    [System.ComponentModelDescription("Customer Type 2")]
    Type2
}

Then, you can get the Description value of enum values as below:

int value = CustermType.Type1;
string type1Description = Enums.GetDescription((CustomerType)value);

For various other ways to get the Description attribute value of the enum, please refer this SO QA

edited May 23 '17 at 11:46

Community

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answered Feb 19 '13 at 07:22

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it is too "hacky", it is not straight forward, you need to do additional casting, code is not clear. You could do also like Enums.GetDescription((CustomerType)CustermType.Type1); but whats the point if I could have it straght forward with string CustermType.Type1String. Thanks anyway, I didn't know before about Description attribute :) – Andrija Feb 19 '13 at 13:28

Enum-like class

2 Answers2