Get Description Attributes From a Flagged Enum

Question

I am trying to create an extension method that will return a List containing all the Description attributes for only the set values o

Answer 1

HasFlag is your friend. :-)

The extension method below uses the GetDescription extension method you've posted above, so ensure you have that. The following should then work:

public static List GetDescriptionsAsText(this Enum yourEnum)
{       
    List descriptions = new List();

    foreach (Enum enumValue in Enum.GetValues(yourEnum.GetType()))
    {
        if (yourEnum.HasFlag(enumValue))
        {
            descriptions.Add(enumValue.GetDescription());
        }
    }

    return descriptions;
}

Note: HasFlag allows you to compare a given Enum value against the flags defined. In your example, if you have

Result y = Result.Value1 | Result.Value2 | Result.Value4;

then

y.HasFlag(Result.Value1)

should be true, while

y.HasFlag(Result.Value3)

will be false.

See also: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.enum.hasflag(v=vs.110).aspx