Can I store enums as strings in EF 5?

Question

We have been using EF CF for a while in our solution. Big fans! Up to this point, we\'ve been using a hack to support enums (creating an extra field on the model; ignore the

Answer 1

I hit this problem a few weeks ago. The best I could come up with is a bit hacky.

I have a Gender enum on the class Person, and I use data annotations to map the string to the database and ignore the enum.

public class Person
{
    public int PersonID { get; set; }
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }

    [Column("Gender")]
    public string GenderString
    {
        get { return Gender.ToString(); }
        private set { Gender = value.ParseEnum(); }
    }

    [NotMapped]
    public Gender Gender { get; set; }
}

And the extension method to get the correct enum from the string.

public static class StringExtensions
{
    public static T ParseEnum(this string value)
    {
        return (T)Enum.Parse(typeof(T), value, true);
    }
}

See this post for full details - http://nodogmablog.bryanhogan.net/2014/11/saving-enums-as-strings-with-entity-framework/