Context

Recently I have been doing some work with enums - a data type that I rarely have need to use. One such task has been to convert an enum to string and vice-versa through query strings and a controller.

Intellisense in VS 2013 shows a very useful method - one I have used with Integers before was TryParse. If you Google for help on string conversion, you are likely to come across outdated .NET 3.0 solutions -- as it turns out TryParse is new to .NET 4.0.

Solution

Here is a dead easy solution, which uses TryParse as mentioned above.

public class MyClass
{
    public enum SortOptions
    {
        Name = 1,
        NameDesc = 2,
        Price = 3,
        PriceDesc = 4
    }

    private SortOptions SortProperty { get; set; }

    public MyClass(string sortOption)
    {
        SortOptions sortEnum;
        //Try to parse string, failure means default to ProductOptions.Name.
        if (!Enum.TryParse(sortOption, out sortEnum))
        {
            sortEnum = SortOptions.Name;
        }

        this.SortProperty = sortEnum;
    }
}

This makes life much simpler, removes the need for exception handling, and is very clean to look at.