Enum from String

Question

I have an Enum and a function to create it from a String because i couldn't find a built in way to do it

enum Visibility{VISIBLE,COLLAPSED,HIDDEN}

Visibility visibilityFromString(String value){
  return Visibility.values.firstWhere((e)=>
      e.toString().split('.')[1].toUpperCase()==value.toUpperCase());
}

//used as
Visibility x = visibilityFromString('COLLAPSED');

but it seems like i have to rewrite this function for every Enum i have, is there a way to write the same function where it takes the Enum type as parameter? i tried to but i figured out that i can't cast to Enum.

//is something with the following signiture actually possible?
     dynamic enumFromString(Type enumType,String value){

     }

Answer 1

I had the same problem in one of my projects and existing solutions were not very clean and it didn't support advanced features like json serialization/deserialization.

Flutter natively doesn't currently support enum with values, however, I managed to develop a helper package Vnum using class and reflectors implementation to overcome this issue.

Address to the repository:

https://github.com/AmirKamali/Flutter_Vnum

To answer your problem using Vnum, you could implement your code as below:

@VnumDefinition
class Visibility extends Vnum<String> {
  static const VISIBLE = const Visibility.define("VISIBLE");
  static const COLLAPSED = const Visibility.define("COLLAPSED");
  static const HIDDEN = const Visibility.define("HIDDEN");

  const Visibility.define(String fromValue) : super.define(fromValue);
  factory Visibility(String value) => Vnum.fromValue(value,Visibility);
}

You can use it like :

var visibility = Visibility('COLLAPSED');
print(visibility.value);

There's more documentation in the github repo, hope it helps you out.