Best practice to look up Java Enum

Question

We have a REST API where clients can supply parameters representing values defined on the server in Java Enums.

So we can provide a descriptive error, we add this

Answer 1

We do all our enums like this when it comes to Rest/Json etc. It has the advantage that the error is human readable and also gives you the accepted value list. We are using a custom method MyEnum.fromString instead of MyEnum.valueOf, hope it helps.

public enum MyEnum {

    A, B, C, D;

    private static final Map NAME_MAP = Stream.of(values())
            .collect(Collectors.toMap(MyEnum::toString, Function.identity()));

    public static MyEnum fromString(final String name) {
        MyEnum myEnum = NAME_MAP.get(name);
        if (null == myEnum) {
            throw new IllegalArgumentException(String.format("'%s' has no corresponding value. Accepted values: %s", name, Arrays.asList(values())));
        }
        return myEnum;
    }
}

so for example if you call

MyEnum value = MyEnum.fromString("X");

you'll get an IllegalArgumentException with the following message:

'X' has no corresponding value. Accepted values: [A, B, C, D]

you can change the IllegalArgumentException to a custom one.