StringyEnums

Provides a slim and fast way for mapping enums to strings and vice versa in C#. StringyEnums targets .Net Standard 2.1, .Net Core 3.1 and .Net Framework 4.8 so it's available to you on all platforms.

About

This package brings a neat way to bind your enum members to a given string and vice versa. You can define it's value with simple attributes and query them by extension methods. This package prefers the runtime performance rather than memory consumption, anyhow it is optimized at its best ™.

Installation

You can either get this package by downloading it from the NuGet Package Manager built in Visual Studio, in the releases tab or from the official nuget.org website.

Also you can install it via the Package Manager Console:

Install-Package StringyEnums

Basic example

[Flags]
public enum FooEnum
{
    [StringRepresentation("tofu")]
    Foo = 1,
    [StringRepresentation("strand bar")]
    Bar = 2,
    [StringRepresentation("tofu strand bar")]
    FooBar = 4
}

EnumCore.Init(); // Put this at the start of your project

var firstResult = FooEnum.Foo.GetRepresentation();
Console.WriteLine(firstResult); // tofu

var secondResult = (FooEnum.Foo | FooEnum.Bar).GetFlagRepresentation();
foreach (var flag in secondResult)
{
    Console.WriteLine(flag); // tofu, strand bar
}

var input = "strand bar";
var thridResult = input.GetEnumFromRepresentation<FooEnum>();
Console.WriteLine(thridResult); // FooEnum.Bar

How it works

StringyEnums is build upon a caching system under the hood, which is initialized at the start of the program, by calling EnumCore.Init(). This method adds all enums with a StringRepresentation to the cache which are in the same assembly that EnumCore.Init() called. Altough you can specify individual assemblies and enums which should be added to the internal cache.

Also note that this package is build on runtime performance on the Release build, which means that some methods might take for way longer than they do in reality. This is intended then the Debug build is not performing to much optimizing.

Disclaimer

Every method has a Try implementation which are safe to use and don't throw exceptions. Only use the none Try implementations, if you are sure that the conversion, no matter which one, will be successful e.g. the enum exists. Otherwise the method will throw a KeyNotFoundException which can have several reasons:

• The enum does not exist
• The enum isn't decorated with the StringRepresentationAttribute
• The enum wasn't added to the cache
• The enum doesn't implement a member with the required StringRepresentationAttribute

Features

• C# 8.0 ready
• build upon runtime performance
• clean and simple to use
• thread save™

Notes

If you feel like something is not working as intended or you are experiencing issues, feel free to create an issue. Also for feature requests just create an issue. For further information feel free to send me a mail to [email protected] or message me on Discord 24_minutes#7496.