I needed the following functionality:
– class MarketSession has property MarketType (options, futures, …)
– this property is an enum, but in the underlying protocol it is actually a number
– in my Spring.NET configuration I wanted to specify a string which would be either a symbolic name or a number; one would use symbolic names for defined market types and numbers for the market types that did not make it yet into the enum
I was pleasantly surprised to find out, that the built-in Enum.Parse() provides exactly what I need. You can give it either a symbolic name, or a numeric value, and it will work fine, even if the value is out of range.
{
Futures = 10,
Options = 20
}
public class MyClass
{
MarketType _marketType;
public string MarketType
{
get { return _marketType.ToString(); }
set { _marketType = Parse<MarketType>(value); }
}
private static T Parse<T>(string s)
{
return (T)Enum.Parse(typeof(T), s);
}
}