Is it good practice to use ordinal of enum? [closed]

Answer 1

Let's consider following example:

We need to order several filters in our Spring Application. This is doable by registering filters via FilterRegistrationBeans:

 @Bean
  public FilterRegistrationBean compressingFilterRegistration() {
    FilterRegistrationBean registration = new FilterRegistrationBean();
    registration.setFilter(compressingFilter());
    registration.setName("CompressingFilter");
    ...
    registration.setOrder(1);
    return registration;
  }

Let's assume we have several filters and we need to specify their order (e.g. we want to set as first the filter which add do MDC context the JSID for all loggers)

And here I see the perfect usecase for ordinal(). Let's create the enum:

   enum FilterRegistrationOrder {
    MDC_FILTER,
    COMPRESSING_FILTER,
    CACHE_CONTROL_FILTER,
    SPRING_SECURITY_FILTER,
    ...
    }

Now in registration bean we can use: registration.setOrder(MDC_FILTER.ordinal());

And it works perfectly in our case. If we haven't had an enum to do that we would have had to re-numerate all filters orders by adding 1 to them (or to constants which stores them). When we have enum you only need to add one line in enum in proper place and use ordinal. We don't have to change the code in many places and we have the clear structure of order for all our filters in one place.

In the case like this I think the ordinal() method is the best option to achieve the order of filters in clean and maintainable way