Using description attribute class with enums

Enums are very useful way to make constant strongly typed replacements for magic numbers/string that are also self-documenting, the down side is they can be a little limiting, to solve this we can use class attributes and extension methods to get more out of them.

Adding a description to a Enum is fairly easy just use the System.ComponentModel.DescriptionAttribute class to add descriptions to the enum values

   1: public enum BuildingTypes

   2: {

   3:     [Description("Retail Space")]

   4:     RetailSpace=1,

   5:     [Description("Office Space")]

   6:     OfficeSpace=2,

   7:     [Description("Single Family Residence")]

   8:     SingleFamilyResidence=3,

   9:     [Description("Multi Family Residence")]

  10:     MultiFamilyResidence=4,

  11:     [Description("Warehouse")]

  12:     Warehouse =5,

  13:     [Description("Manufacturing")]

  14:     Manufacturing =6

  15: }

In order to get the descriptions from the enum we need to do a little reflection and wrap it up in an extension method

   1: public static string ToDiscription(this Enum value)

   2: {

   3:     var description = string.Empty;

   4:     FieldInfo fi = value.GetType().GetField(value.ToString());

   5:  

   6:     var attributes = (DescriptionAttribute[])fi.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute),false);

   7:  

   8:     if (attributes != null && attributes.Length > 0)

   9:     {

  10:         description = attributes[0].Description;

  11:     }

  12:     else

  13:     {

  14:         description = value.ToString();

  15:     }

  16:     return description;

  17: }

Simple as that, for the full source see my sample code repository