Logic and datatype existential problem

Archived Forums Questions & Answers
1

The title might sound scary but I have just a question about data types.

Quite simply, I would need something like this:

public class myclass {
  int myint = 0;
  string mystring = "";

  public myclass(int localint, string localstring) {
    myint = localint;
    mystring = localstring;

  }
}

public enum myenum : myclass {
  enum1 = new myclass(9,"abr"),
  enum2 = new myclass(99,"acad"),
  enum3 = new myclass(999,"abra")
}

So that elsewhere, when I need ‘abra’, instead of manually instantiating it, and having countless duplicates all over the code, I just

myenum mylocalenum;
mylocalenum = enum3; //no mistake, the underlying class variables are predefined

The purpose is to have a selectable, pre-set ‘myenum’ which basically encapsulates another data structure which I predefine in the declaration phase.

This is because I have several data pre-sets by design, and I need to interact with them as with an enum (get their number, their descriptions, and basically associate them with predefined values).

If you have a solution, or even a resembling alternative, please let me know.

3

Add a constructor to your class that takes that enum as the only parameter and then have the constructor switch on the type to set the values.

public class myclass {
  int myint = 0;
  string mystring = "";

  public myclass(int localint, string localstring) {
    myint = localint;
    mystring = localstring;
  }

  public myclass(myenum id)
{
    switch(id)
   {
     case enum1:
        myint = 9;
        mystring = "abr";
        break;
     case enum2:
        myint = 99;
        mystring = "acad";
        break;
     case enum3:
        myint = 999;
        mystring = "abra";
        break;
  }
}

public enum myenum : myclass {
  enum1,
  enum2,
  enum3
}
2

Couldn’t you use inheritance and polymorphism for this sort of thing? Unless I’m misunderstanding, you want to be able to assign a value to a variable that represents a class with different values. From your example above, each enum essentially just represents a pair of numbers. You could just have a base class with some abstract functions which return data in the child classes.

But I guess I could understand resisting that route - lots of overhead, extra files - no good. I guess you could do something like this:

public class MyClass {
    ...
}

public enum MyEnum {
    class1 = 1,
    class2 = 2,
    class3 = 3
}

public class OtherClass {
    MyClass[] classes;

    public void Awake() {
        classes = new MyClass[3];
        classes[class1] = new MyClass(99, "asda");
        ....
    }

    public MyClass GetStuff(MyEnum type)
    {
        return classes[type];
    }
 }

But it still feels kind of messy. I’d probably still go with inheritance. You simply can’t use an enum in the way you are describing.