Can my enums have friendly names? [duplicate]
You could use the Description
attribute, as Yuriy suggested. The following extension method makes it easy to get the description for a given value of the enum:
public static string GetDescription(this Enum value)
{
Type type = value.GetType();
string name = Enum.GetName(type, value);
if (name != null)
{
FieldInfo field = type.GetField(name);
if (field != null)
{
DescriptionAttribute attr =
Attribute.GetCustomAttribute(field,
typeof(DescriptionAttribute)) as DescriptionAttribute;
if (attr != null)
{
return attr.Description;
}
}
}
return null;
}
You can use it like this:
public enum MyEnum
{
[Description("Description for Foo")]
Foo,
[Description("Description for Bar")]
Bar
}
MyEnum x = MyEnum.Foo;
string description = x.GetDescription();
Enum value names must follow the same naming rules as all identifiers in C#, therefore only first name is correct.