Documenting Enum Values

If you maintain a codebase that is of any decent size, chances are you'll have defined a fair few enum types. You may also need these types and their values to be documented somewhere, as not everyone who needs them could have access to the code where they are defined.

You could of course do this manually, but if you already have lots of types this could be tedious. Luckily its quite simple to write something that will do this for you.

The code below takes a parameter for the assembly path and name, and writes the values to the Console.

private static void DumpAssemblyEnums(string assemblyPath)
{
    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

    // flag to check if we should put the string we 
    // create into the Console output
    bool hasEntriesToShow = false;
    try
    {
        builder.AppendLine(string.Format("===== {0} =====", assemblyPath));

        // load assembly from the path
        Assembly assembly = Assembly.LoadFrom(assemblyPath);

        // get the types from this assembly
        Type[] assemblyTypes = assembly.GetTypes();

        for (int i = 0; i < assemblyTypes.Length; i++)
        {
            try
            {
                // check if the type is an enum
                if (assemblyTypes[i].IsEnum)
                {
                    hasEntriesToShow = true;

                    // output the full type name of this enum
                    builder.AppendLine(
                        string.Format("==== {0} ====", 
                        assemblyTypes[i].FullName));

                    // get the values for the enum type
                    Array array = Enum.GetValues(assemblyTypes[i]);

                    // loop through the array
                    for (int j = 0; j < array.Length; j++)
                    {
                        // output the numeric value by converting to a 
                        // long
                        // use long as enum values can be larger than 
                        // an int
                        builder.AppendLine(
                            "  " + Convert.ToInt64(array.GetValue(j)) + 
                            " = " + array.GetValue(j).ToString());
                    }
                    builder.AppendLine();
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                // output any error
                builder.AppendLine("**ERROR: " + ex.Message + "**");
            }
        }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        // output any error
        builder.AppendLine("**ERROR: " + ex.Message + "**");
    }

    // push to Console stream if we've got something to show
    if (hasEntriesToShow)
        Console.Write(builder.ToString());
}

You can call this directly, or use a directory traversal to output all enum values in all assemblies in a directory.

This example will output into a format which can be used on a Wiki page, but you can edit it to output in any format you like.