Anyone know a good workaround for the lack of an enum generic constraint?

Question

What I want to do is something like this: I have enums with combined flagged values.

public static class EnumExtension
{
    public static bool IsSet

        

Answer 1

You can achieve this using IL Weaving and ExtraConstraints

Allows you to write this code

public class Sample
{
    public void MethodWithDelegateConstraint<[DelegateConstraint] T> ()
    {        
    }
    public void MethodWithEnumConstraint<[EnumConstraint] T>()
    {
    }
}

What gets compiled

public class Sample
{
    public void MethodWithDelegateConstraint<T>() where T: Delegate
    {
    }

    public void MethodWithEnumConstraint<T>() where T: struct, Enum
    {
    }
}

Answer 2

The way I do it is put a struct constraint, then check that T is an enum at runtime. This doesn't eliminate the problem completely, but it does reduce it somewhat

Answer 3

EDIT: This is now live in version 0.0.0.2 of UnconstrainedMelody.

(As requested on my blog post about enum constraints. I've included the basic facts below for the sake of a standalone answer.)

The best solution is to wait for me to include it in UnconstrainedMelody¹. This is a library which takes C# code with "fake" constraints such as

where T : struct, IEnumConstraint

and turns it into

where T : struct, System.Enum

via a postbuild step.

It shouldn't be too hard to write IsSet... although catering for both Int64-based and UInt64-based flags could be the tricky part. (I smell some helper methods coming on, basically allowing me to treat any flags enum as if it had a base type of UInt64.)

What would you want the behaviour to be if you called

tester.IsSet(MyFlags.A | MyFlags.C)

? Should it check that all the specified flags are set? That would be my expectation.

I'll try to do this on the way home tonight... I'm hoping to have a quick blitz on useful enum methods to get the library up to a usable standard quickly, then relax a bit.

EDIT: I'm not sure about IsSet as a name, by the way. Options:

• Includes
• Contains
• HasFlag (or HasFlags)
• IsSet (it's certainly an option)

Thoughts welcome. I'm sure it'll be a while before anything's set in stone anyway...

---

¹ or submit it as a patch, of course...

Answer 4

Darren, that would work if the types were specific enumerations - for general enumerations to work you have to cast them to ints (or more likely uint) to do the boolean math:

public static bool IsSet( this Enum input, Enum matchTo )
{
    return ( Convert.ToUInt32( input ) & Convert.ToUInt32( matchTo ) ) != 0;
}

Answer 5

This doesn't answer the original question, but there is now a method in .NET 4 called Enum.HasFlag which does what you are trying to do in your example

Answer 6

I just wanted to add Enum as a generic constraint.

While this is just for a tiny helper method using ExtraConstraints is a bit too much overhead for me.

I decided to just just create a struct constraint and add a runtime check for IsEnum. For converting a variable from T to Enum I cast it to object first.

    public static Converter<T, string> CreateConverter<T>() where T : struct
    {
        if (!typeof(T).IsEnum) throw new ArgumentException("Given Type is not an Enum");
        return new Converter<T, string>(x => ((Enum)(object)x).GetEnumDescription());
    }