DataBinding to Enum Values

When you have an Enum variable, and you want to build a UI to let the user choose one of this values, it's very convenient to show the user the current allowed values of the Enum.

You can avoid duplicate data, doing this... (note it uses reflection, so in high performance environments you should cache this info)

comboBox.DataSource = typeof(YourEnumType).GetFields(BindingFlags.Public);

comboBox.DisplayMember = "Name";

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2005
  You can also do:
  
  comboBox.DataSource = Enum.GetValues(typeof(YourEnumType));
• Anonymous
  February 22, 2005
  Or, you can simply use Enum's GetNames method
  
  comboBox.DataSource = Enum.GetNames(typeof(YourEnumType));
  
  
• Anonymous
  February 22, 2005
  Another option would be to use Enum.GetNames(), which returns an array of strings containing each value of the enum. I'm not sure how it's performance compares to that of using GetFields(), however.
• Anonymous
  March 17, 2005
  Not sure how you managed to get this to work without changing it to:<br><br>comboBox.DataSource = typeof(YourEnumType).GetFields(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Static);<br><br><br>To quote MSDN<br><br>&quot;You must specify either BindingFlags.Instance or BindingFlags.Static in order to get a return.&quot;<br><br><br>