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Use the DescriptionAttribute with an Enum to display status messages.

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I've been working on various forms of displaying status messages from enums, and here's the latest preferred iteration of how to do this. Regurgitated and tweaked from WayneHartman.com.

 public enum XmlValidationResult
{
    [Description("Success.")]
    Success,
    [Description("Could not load file.")]
    FileLoadError,
    [Description("Could not load schema.")]
    SchemaLoadError,
    [Description("Form XML did not pass schema validation.")]
    SchemaError
}

private string GetEnumDescription(Enum value)
{
    // Get the Description attribute value for the enum value
    FieldInfo fi = value.GetType().GetField(value.ToString());
    DescriptionAttribute[] attributes = 
        (DescriptionAttribute[])fi.GetCustomAttributes(
            typeof(DescriptionAttribute), false);

    if (attributes.Length > 0)
    {
        return attributes[0].Description;
    }
    else
    {
        return value.ToString();
    }
}

It's possible to do something even cooler like cache the values or add a ToDescription() method (in C#3.0), but I just wanted an simple, repeatable way to do this.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2014
    Thanks. I added this to a class I was building to Convert an ENUM to an ItemsSource so that when I add  DescriptionAttributes to an Enum I can show a "pretty" choice in dropdowns etc.

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2015
    Can i read Enum description from a xml file? Can XMLEnum be used for this purpose?