Enum.GetValues on .net compact framework

March 19, 2009 in Uncategorized
Tags: .netcf, c#, code

i recently needed to use Enum.GetValues on a .netcf project. but unfortunately it is not there in .netcf. googling gives a lot of solutions that we can use in .netcf. but i couldn’t find one that worked exactly as Enum.GetValue did.

Retrieves an array of the values of the constants in a specified enumeration.

is the method description for the Enum.GetValue, taken from msdn.com. most of the solutions online returned only an array of the constants. not their values. so i came up with the following. now of course this is inspired from lot of smart people’s code that i took from around the net sometime back.

private static string EnumValuesToString(object e)
        {
            var eVal = (int) e;
            var allValues = GetValues(typeof (Testnum));
            var strings = new List<string>();

            foreach (var value in allValues)
            {
                if (value > eVal)
                {
                    break;
                }
                if ((eVal & value) != value)
                {
                    continue;
                }
                strings.Add(value.ToString());
            }

            return string.Join(",", strings.ToArray());
        }

        private static int[] GetValues(Type enumType)
        {
            if (enumType.BaseType ==
                typeof (Enum))
            {
                //get the public static fields (members of the enum)
                var fi = enumType.GetFields(BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.Public);
                //create a new enum array
                var values = new int[fi.Length];
                //populate with the values
                for (var iEnum = 0; iEnum < fi.Length; iEnum++)
                {
                    values[iEnum] = (int) fi[iEnum].GetValue(null);
                }
                //return the array
                return values;
            }

            //the type supplied does not derive from enum
            throw new ArgumentException("enumType parameter is not a System.Enum");
        }

usage would go like

        [Flags]
        public enum Testenum
        {
            fld1 = 1,
            fld2 = 2,
            fld3 = 4,
            fld4 = 8,
            fld5 = 16
        }

        #endregion

        public ClassTest()
        {
            EnumValuesToString(Testenum.fld1 | Testenum.fld2 | Testenum.fld4);
        }

may this help me/you/him or her in the future