What's the best practice to "look up" Java Enums?
- by Marcus
We have a REST API where clients can supply parameters representing values defined on the server in Java Enums.
So we can provide a descriptive error, we add this lookup method to each Enum. Seems like we're just copying code (bad). Is there a better practice?
public enum MyEnum {
A, B, C, D;
public static MyEnum lookup(String id) {
try {
return MyEnum.valueOf(id);
} catch (IllegalArgumentException e) {
throw new RuntimeException("Invalid value for my enum blah blah: " + id);
}
}
}
Update: The default error message provided by valueOf(..) would be No enum const class a.b.c.MyEnum.BadValue. I would like to provide a more descriptive error from the API.
