Defining Descriptive Text for Enumeration Members

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An http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/042804-1.aspx enumeration is a special type in the .NET Framework that is comprised of a number of named constants.
While you might not have created an enumeration type yourself, you have likely used enumerations many times in day-to-day programming. For example, the rows in a
GridView have a http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.webcontrols.gridviewrow.rowtype.aspx

RowType

property that returns an
enumeration of type http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.webcontrols.datacontrolrowtype.aspx

DataControlRowType

that
indicates the rows type:

Header

,

Footer

,

DataRow

, and so on.

When working with an enumeration we may need to display a descriptive message based on the enumerations value. For example, using http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/120705-1.aspx ASP.NETs
Membership system you can programmatically create a new user account calling the http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.security.membership.aspx

Membership

class s http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/82xx2e62.aspx

CreateUser

method . This method specifies the success or failure of the
operation via the http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.security.membershipcreatestatus.aspx

MembershipCreateStatus

enumeration .
This enumeration has members like

Success

,

InvalidUserName

,

InvalidPassword

,

DuplicateUserName

, and the like. When
calling this method from an ASP.NET page you might want to show the user a descriptive message based on this enumeration value.

This article explores three different ways to provide descriptive text for enumeration members. Read on to learn more!

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