I have a few methods like the following

public static string RequestEntry (string name)
{
    if (name == "John" || name == "Bob" || name == "Ken")
        return $"Hello {name}, you may enter";
    return $"Get out of here {name}, no one like you!";
}
    
public static string Kiddify (string name)
{
    if (name == "John" || name == "Bob" || name == "Ken")
        return $"{name}{name[^1]}y";
    return $"Get out of here {name}, no one like you!";
}

Note: These are only meant to demonstrate a concept and not the purposes of my real methods. My real methods have their own isolated functionality.)

My issues with this is:

1. I am a very bad typer/speller and will most likely mistype the string that pass into this method, which could introduce bugs.
2. I don't want there to be a default case, because I have specific input string I want to work with.
3. Programming is a hobby. I will sometimes go weeks without having time to code and remembering the valid strings I can pass is highly unlikely.

So, I thought to use an enum

public enum Name{
    John,
    Bob,
    Ken
}

and implement the methods as follows

public static string RequestEntry (Name name)
{
    string sName = name switch
    {
        Name.John => "John",
        Name.Bob => "Bob",
        Name.Ken => "Ken",  
        _ => throw new NotImplementedException()
    };

    return $"Hello {sName}, you may enter";
}
    
public static string Kiddify (Name name)
{
    return name switch
    {
        Name.John => "Johnny",
        Name.Bob => "Bobby",
        Name.Ken => "Kenny",    
        _ => throw new NotImplementedException()
    };
}

I feel like this would be pretty common practice, and it solves all my above issues. Now my issue is that modifying Names will mean I also have to modify my class methods to deal with the changes.

And finally, we get to the question. Is there another way I do this?

I considered using reflection and attributes to assign string values to the different names in the enum, but I would have to assign a different string attribute for each use case. I don't like that idea and don't like using reflection if at all possible.

CodePudding user response：

Why not organize names into a collection? For instance

private static readonly HashSet<string> s_Names = new() {
  "John", "Bob", "Ken"
};

public static string RequestEntry (string name) =>
  s_Names.Contains(name)
    ? $"Hello {name}, you may enter"
    : $"Get out of here {name}, no one like you!";

CodePudding user response：

You can use the Enum.ToString method to get the string "John" from an enum. For example:

Names.John.ToString()

You can use your Kiddify method on this string afterwards.

(The opposite is Enum.TryParse which will get the enum value from a string. )