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Articles about working with enums in C#.
The simplest way to get an enum’s int value is by casting it to an int. Here’s an example: This outputs the following: When the enum is generic (of type ‘Enum’) You can’t cast a generic ‘Enum’ to int, otherwise you get a compiler error (CS0030 Cannot convert type ‘System.Enum’ to ‘int’). Use Convert.Int32() instead. … Read more
When you’re using reflection to look at a type’s properties, you can use PropertyInfo.PropertyType.IsEnum to check if the property is an enum. This is helpful when you want to be able to safely call an Enum API method (such as Enum.Parse()) on the reflected type, thus preventing an exception – ArgumentException: Type provided must be … Read more
Here’s how you can use Enum as a generic constraint: Note: Microsoft added this feature in C# 7.3. Whenever you have a generic method, it’s a good idea to use generic type constraints. Without constraints, you would have to implement type checking in the generic method and throw exceptions if an invalid type was used. … Read more
Let’s say you have a list of HTTP status codes that you read in when the service starts up (perhaps from appsettings.json or from the database). Whenever you send an HTTP request, you want to check if the returned status code is in this list of status code. To make things more efficient, you want … Read more
When you need to show enum values in a dropdown, it’s a good idea to automatically populate the list, instead of manually setting all of the values. To fill the dropdown with the enum’s values, set the DataSource to Enum.Values(), like this: Then to get the option the user picked, do the following: When I … Read more
Enum flags allow you to put multiple values in an enum variable/parameter. This is a nice alternative to the problem of having to pass around a ton of bools . You set multiple values by bitwise ORing them together. Here’s an example: In this article, I’ll show how to create and use enum flags. Use … Read more
When you’re using System.Text.Json to deserialize JSON that contains the string representation of an enum, you get the following exception: System.Text.Json.JsonException: The JSON value could not be converted to <Enum Type> The following JSON would cause this exception. Conference is an enum, and this is using the string representation “NFC” instead of the numeric value … Read more
