Fabrice's weblog

So you have an associative array (dictionary) where the keys are of type 'Color' and the values are of type 'string'?.

You could do that with Generics, I guess...!?

This is getting close, but the advantage with enums is that the set of possible keys is well defined and compile-time cheched.

What I do for this is use a custom attribute that I call "MemberDescriptionAttribute". Then I can get it from reflection.

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.All)]
public class MemberDescriptionAttribute : Attribute
{
public readonly string Description;

public MemberDescriptionAttribute(string description)
{
this.Description = description;
}

public static string FromMember(object obj)
{
return((MemberDescriptionAttribute)obj.GetType().GetMember(
obj.ToString())[0].GetCustomAttributes(typeof(MemberDescriptionAttribute), false)[0]).Description;
}

public static string FromType(object obj)
{
return((MemberDescriptionAttribute)obj.GetType().GetCustomAttributes(typeof(MemberDescriptionAttribute), false)[0]).Description;
}

public static ArrayList ToArrayList(System.Type type)
{
string[] names = Enum.GetNames(type);
ArrayList toReturn = new ArrayList( names.Length );
DictionaryEntry de;
foreach(string n in names)
{
object current = Enum.Parse(type, n, true);
string description = MemberDescriptionAttribute.FromMember(current);
de = new DictionaryEntry();
de.Key = description;
de.Value = n;
toReturn.Add( de );
}

return toReturn;
}
}

class Class1
{
public enum Colors
{
[MemberDescription("#FF000")]
Red,

[MemberDescription("#00FF00")]
Green,

[MemberDescription("#0000FF")]
Blue
}

[STAThread]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
ArrayList list = MemberDescriptionAttribute.ToArrayList(typeof(Colors));

foreach(DictionaryEntry de in list)
{
Console.WriteLine(de.Value + " = " + de.Key);
}

Console.ReadLine();
}
}

Chris, I have something similar. See my post about the StringValueAttribute: http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2004/06/24/164902.aspx