InfiniteEnumFlags 0.2.1

InfiniteEnumFlags

Status: (Project is in active development)

The dotnet enum flags feature is amazing, but it is too limited 🙁. InfiniteEnumFlags is the same without limitation. 😊

Introduction

Dotnet Enum has an [Flags] attribute that gives us the ability to have a binary enum system and use bitwise operators. However, enum specifically restricts to built-in numeric types which is a big problem because it is limited to 2^32 for int values which means we only can have a maximum of 32 items in our enum or 2^64 for long which limits us to a maximum of 64 items.

this library aims to remove these restrictions and still give us the same functionality.

Getting started

To define an enum class, you can create a class/record and inherit it from InfiniteEnum<ClassName>, this base class, later on, will help you to access the list of defined enum items. then by adding static fields of type Flag<ClassName> you can create your enums. setting the values is imperative to provide values as powers of two.

e.g

public class Features : InfiniteEnum<Features>
{
    public static readonly Flag<Features> None = new(-1);  // 0  - 0
    public static readonly Flag<Features> F1 = new(0);     // 1  - 1
    public static readonly Flag<Features> F2 = new(1);     // 2  - 10
    public static readonly Flag<Features> F3 = new(2);     // 4  - 100
    public static readonly Flag<Features> F4 = new(3);     // 8  - 1000
    public static readonly Flag<Features> F5 = new(4);     // 16 - 10000
    public static readonly Flag<Features> F6 = new(5);     // 32 - 100000
    public static readonly Flag<Features> F7 = new(6);     // 64 - 1000000
    public static readonly Flag<Features> F8 = new(7);     // 128 - 10000000

    // We can support up to 2,147,483,647 items
}

Usage

To use your custom enum, it is important to be familiar with the built-in dotnet enum flags capabilities because the functionalities are almost identical. for example we can use all bitwise operators (|,&,~,^) in our custom enum.

e.g

var features = Features.F1 | Features.F3;  // F1 + F3 

Alternatively, If you don't like bitwise Operators, you can use the EnumItem extension methods:

e.g

features.HasFlag(Features.F2); // false

Storing EnumItem's value

Since we want to support more than 32 items in our enums, we can not store an integer value, luckily we can use EnumItem ToBase64Key() function to get a unique base64 key, and to convert it back to an EnumItem we can use EnumItem.FromBase64() static method.

var features = Features.F1.SetFlag(Features.F3); 
string key = features.ToBase64Key();
var new_features = Features.FromBase64(key); 
Console.WriteLine(features == new_features); // true

Example

To see flexible aspnetcore authorization example using InfiniteEnumFlags, first clone the repo using below command

 git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/alirezanet/InfiniteEnumFlags.git

then you can open \InfiniteEnumFlags\Example\flexible-aspnetcore-authorization\FlexibleAuth\FlexibleAuth.sln and then run the Server project.

Support

• Don't forget to give a ⭐ on GitHub
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• Write a blog post about InfiniteEnumFlags

Contribution

Feel free to send me a pull request!

License

MIT