Extending an enum via inheritance

Question

I know this rather goes against the idea of enums, but is it possible to extend enums in C#/Java? I mean \"extend\" in both the sense of adding new values to an enum, but a

Answer 1

Some time back even i wanted to do something like this and found that enum extensions would voilate lot of basic concepts... (Not just polymorphisim)

But still u might need to do if the enum is declared in external library and Remember you should make a special caution when using this enum extensions...

public enum MyEnum { A = 1, B = 2, C = 4 }

public const MyEnum D = (MyEnum)(8);
public const MyEnum E = (MyEnum)(16);

func1{
    MyEnum EnumValue = D;

    switch (EnumValue){
      case D:  break;
      case E:  break;
      case MyEnum.A:  break;
      case MyEnum.B:  break;
   }
}

Answer 2

The reason you can't extend Enums is because it would lead to problems with polymorphism.

Say you have an enum MyEnum with values A, B, and C , and extend it with value D as MyExtEnum.

Suppose a method expects a myEnum value somewhere, for instance as a parameter. It should be legal to supply a MyExtEnum value, because it's a subtype, but now what are you going to do when it turns out the value is D?

To eliminate this problem, extending enums is illegal

Answer 3

When built-in enums aren't enough, you can do it the old fashion way and craft your own. For example, if you wanted to add an additional property, for example, a description field, you could do it as follows:

public class Action {
    public string Name {get; private set;}
    public string Description {get; private set;}

    private Action(string name, string description) {
        Name = name;
        Description = description;
    }

    public static Action DoIt = new Action("Do it", "This does things");
    public static Action StopIt = new Action("Stop It", "This stops things");
}

You can then treat it like an enum like so:

public void ProcessAction(Action a) {
    Console.WriteLine("Performing action: " + a.Name)
    if (a == Action.DoIt) {
       // ... and so on
    }
}

The trick is to make sure that the constructor is private (or protected if you want to inherit), and that your instances are static.