Enums or Tables?

Question

I am making this a community wiki, as I would appreciate people\'s approach and not necessarily an answer.

I am in the situation where I have a lot of lookup type data

Answer 1

For static items I use Enum with [Description()] attribute for each element. And T4 template to regenerate enum with descriptions on build (or whenever you want)

public enum EnumSalary
    {
        [Description("0 - 25K")] Low,
        [Description("25K - 100K")] Mid,
        [Description("100K+")] High
    }

And use it like

string str = EnumSalary.Mid.Description()

P.S. also created extension for System.Enum

public static string Description(this Enum value) {
    FieldInfo fi = value.GetType().GetField(value.ToString());
    var attributes = (DescriptionAttribute[]) fi.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute), false );
    return attributes.Length > 0 ? attributes[0].Description : value.ToString();
}

and reverse to create enum by description

public static TEnum ToDescriptionEnum(this string description)
{
    Type enumType = typeof(TEnum);
    foreach (string name in Enum.GetNames(enumType))
    {
        var enValue = Enum.Parse(enumType, name);
        if (Description((Enum)enValue).Equals(description)) {
            return (TEnum) enValue;
        }
    }
    throw new TargetException("The string is not a description or value of the specified enum.");
}