Enums or Tables?

Question

I am making this a community wiki, as I would appreciate people\'s approach and not necessarily an answer.

I am in the situation where I have a lot of lookup type data

Answer 1

One way is to write a formatter that can turn you enum into string representations:

public class SalaryFormatter : IFormatProvider, ICustomFormatter
{
    public object GetFormat(Type formatType)
    {
         return (formatType == typeof(ICustomFormatter)) ? new
         SalaryFormatter () : null;
    }

    public string Format(string format, object o, IFormatProvider formatProvider)
    {
        if (o.GetType().Equals(typeof(Salary)))
        {
            return o.ToString();

            Salary salary = (Salary)o;
            switch (salary)
            {
                case Salary.Low:
                     return "0 - 25K";
                case Salary.Mid:
                     return "25K - 100K";
                case Salary.High:
                     return "100K+";
                default:
                     return salary.ToString();
            }
        }

    return o.ToString();
    }
}

You use the formatter like any other formatter:

Console.WriteLine(String.Format(new SalaryFormatter(), "Salary: {0}", salary));

The formatter can be extented to support different formats through formatting strings, multiple types, localization and so on.