Enum Display Extension
By 30 Oct 2011
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In response to Adrian Cole's comment to the OP - due to living and working in a country where there are four official languages, plus English as a de facto fifth, I've encountered this before.
Provided you have the corresponding .resx files embedded in the same assembly as the enum
and your enum
values correspond to the resource names in those files, you can do the following:
Create a bog-standard enum
without attributes:
//standard enum public enum EmployeeType { Boss, AdministrativeAssistant, Janitor, StandardEmployee }
And create an extension method that uses the enum
value as the key for the .NET Framework to look up the appropriate language string
:
//Enum Extension class public static class EnumExtensions { //Gets the localized string representation of the enum value public static string ToLocalizedString(this Enum value) { var resourceManager = new ResourceManager(Type.GetType( string.Format("{0}.{1}Strings", value.GetType().Namespace, value.GetType().Name))); var localizedString = resourceManager.GetString(value.ToString()); return string.IsNullOrEmpty(localizedString) ? value.ToString() : localizedString; } }
Then all you need to do to get a localized string
in place of the enum
value is:
var localized = EmployeeType.Boss.ToLocalizedString();
And for converting a localized string
back to the enum
, you call an extension method on the string
:
//string extension method public static T FromLocalizedString<T>(this string localizedString) { var t = typeof (T); var resourceType = Type.GetType(string.Format("{0}.{1}Strings", t.Namespace, t.Name)); var enumObject = resourceType.GetProperties() .Where(p => p.GetValue(null, null) != null && p.GetValue(null, null).ToString() == localizedString) .DefaultIfEmpty(null) .FirstOrDefault(); return enumObject == null ? default(T) : (T)Enum.Parse(t, enumObject.Name); }
like this:
var boss = "Chef".FromLocalizedString<EmployeeType>();