The other day I was curious to bind a static enum list to any databound control in .NET 2.0. The enum might be part of your business object in the middle tier. I did some research on this and found that is pretty easy and intuitive. Let’s see a example:
public enum ApartmentTypes
{
Studio,
OneBedroom = 1,
TwoBedroom = 2,
ThreeBedroom = 3
}
All user defined enums extend System.Enum class. So, to bind DropDownList control to ApartmentTypes enum, the code looks like this:
if (!Page.IsPostBack)
{
DropDownList1.DataSource = Enum.GetNames(typeof(ApartmentTypes));
DropDownList1.DataBind();
}
This code will bind to the enum directly and looking at the page source reveals that both the text and value for each entry in the Dropdownlist control is the same. Since no two entries will have the same entry, this shouldn’t cause any trouble. But, ideally the value should have the actual enum values and not the text to enable us to do more processing when doing a postback. To get the value for the entry selected in the dropdownlist, we should use the Parse method in the Enum class.
int value = (int)Enum.Parse(typeof(ApartmentTypes), DropDownList1.SelectedItem.Text);
This is the final code:
if (!Page.IsPostBack)
{
DropDownList1.DataSource = Enum.GetNames(typeof(ApartmentTypes));
DropDownList1.DataBind();
}
else
{
Response.Output.WriteLine((int)Enum.Parse(typeof(ApartmentTypes), DropDownList1.SelectedItem.Text));
}
