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

After installing the InfiniteEnumFlags NuGet package, there are several ways to use this package. I start with the easiest one.

Define your enum flags

1. using source generator (Recommended)

To define your enum, you must create a partial class and extend it using IArrayFlags or IIndexDictionaryFlags and Implement the Items function that returns a list of strings.

IArrayFlagse.g.

public partial class FeaturesEnum : IArrayFlags
{
    public string[] Items() => new[]
    {
    //  Name -- Value - Index - Bits 
        "F1",  // 1   -   0   - 0001
        "F2",  // 2   -   1   - 0010
        "F3",  // 4   -   2   - 0100
        "F4",  // 8   -   3   - 1000
    };
}

In this example, F1-F4 are the enum items that give you binary sequence values using the source generator.

Note: remember, the item's order when using IArrayFlags is Important

after creating this class the below code will be generated in the background that you can use to work with your Enums.

public partial class FeaturesEnum
{
    public const int TOTAL_ITEMS = 4;
    public static readonly EnumItem None = new(0, TOTAL_ITEMS);
    public static readonly EnumItem All = ~None;
    public static readonly EnumItem F1 = new(1, TOTAL_ITEMS);
    public static readonly EnumItem F2 = new(2, TOTAL_ITEMS);
    public static readonly EnumItem F3 = new(3, TOTAL_ITEMS);
    public static readonly EnumItem F4 = new(4, TOTAL_ITEMS);
}

You can use the IIndexDictionaryFlags instead of IArrayFlags if you wanna take control of the item's order and values.

IIndexDictionaryFlagse.g

public partial class FeaturesEnum : IIndexDictionaryFlags
{
    public Dictionary<string, int> Items() => new()
    {
      // Name, Order     Index - Value - Bits
        { "F1", 2 }, //    2   -   4   - 100
        { "F2", 0 }, //    0   -   1   - 001
        { "F3", 1 }  //    1   -   2   - 010
    };
}

2. Manual

In the previous example we saw the generated code using source generator. The second way of creating Enums is to manually create this class which gives us the same functionality. but I believe it is harder to manage.

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 = FeaturesEnum.F1 | FeaturesEnum.F3;  // F1 + F3

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

Name	Description
HasFlag	Check whatever enum has an specific flag or not, (bitwise &)
SetFlag	Add/Set specific flag(s) to an enum, (bitwise or)
UnsetFlag	Remove/Unset specific flag(s) from an enum (bitwise &~)
ToggleFlag	It toggles flag(s) from an enum (bitwise ^)

e.g

features.HasFlag(FeaturesEnum.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 = FeaturesEnum.F1.SetFlag(FeaturesEnum.F3); 
var key = features.ToBase64Key();
var new_features = EnumItem.FromBase64(key); 
Console.WriteLine(features == new_features); // true

Support

Don't forget to give a ⭐ on GitHub
Share your feedback and ideas to improve this tool
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Contribution

Feel free to send me a pull request!

License

MIT

mollaeian/InfiniteEnumFlags