Ts-Enums

A TypeScript library for enums, inspired by Java enums and forked from Enumify.

Motivation

Dr. Axel Rauschmeyer created Enumify to bring an analogue of Java's Enums to JavaScript. In a blog post, he explained why a naive implementation of enums in JavaScript lacks the power of Java Enums.

TypeScript Enums provide a start to a Java-style Enum implementation, but they lack the killer feature of Java's Enum: classes. Java's Enums are full classes, enabling properties and methods (including abstract methods and overriding within an enum). In contrast, TypeScript enums are limited to being namespaced integers or strings.

Enumify is a strong introduction to class-style enums in JavaScript, and this project ports the idea to TypeScript. This port loses the feature from Enumify of creating an enumeration from an array of Strings, but string-based TypeScript enums were added in 2.4.1, so that is not a large loss.

The basics

Install:

npm install ts-enums

Use:

import {Enum, EnumValue} from 'ts-enums';
 
export class Color extends EnumValue {
  constructor(name: string) {
    super(name);
  }
}
 
class ColorEnumType extends Enum<Color> {
 
  RED: Color = new Color('RED name');
  GREEN: Color = new Color('GREEN name');
  BLUE: Color = new Color('BLUE name');
 
  constructor() {
    super();
    this.initEnum('Color');
  }
}
 
export const ColorEnum: ColorEnumType = new ColorEnumType();
 
// examples of use
console.log(ColorEnum.RED.toString()); // Color.RED
console.log(ColorEnum.GREEN instanceof Color); // true
 
new Color();
    // Error: EnumValue classes can’t be instantiated individually

Unfortunately, this is not as terse as Enumify's syntax. Here are the steps:

1. We define the implementation of EnumValue that defines each of the instances.
2. We implement each instance of the EnumValue as a property on the Enum. Within the Enum, we call initEnum() with a unique name to set up all of the Enum-specific behavior.
3. We export an instance of the enum so that other modules can use it.

Properties of Enum classes

Enum exposes the getter values, which produces an Array with all enum values:

for (const c of ColorEnum.values) {
    console.log(c.toString());
}
// Output:
// Color.RED
// Color.GREEN
// Color.BLUE

Enum exposes the methods byPropName and byDescription, to extract the EnumValue instance by either the property name of the object in the Enum or the description string passed into the EnumValue's constructor, respectively:

console.log(ColorEnum.byPropName('RED') === ColorEnum.RED); // true
console.log(ColorEnum.byDescription('RED name') === ColorEnum.RED); // true
true

Properties of enum values

Ts-Enums adds two properties to every enum value:

• propName: the property name of the object in the Enum.

  > ColorEnum.BLUE.name
  'BLUE'

• ordinal: the position of the enum value within the Array values.

  > ColorEnum.BLUE.ordinal
  2

Adding properties to enum values

The EnumValues are full TypeScript classes, enabling you to add properties and methods (see the tests for more examples).

import {Enum, EnumValue} from 'ts-enums';
import {Color, ColorEnum} from 'color';
 
class BridgeSuit extends EnumValue {
  constructor(name: string, private _isMajor: boolean = false) {
    super(name);
  }
 
  // can use simple properties (defensively-copied 
  // to maintain immutability)
  get isMajor(): boolean{
    return this._isMajor;
  }
 
  // can also use methods, though this isn't an ideal implementation. 
  // (I would probably used another property instead of an if-else)
  get color(): Color {
    if (this === BridgeSuiteEnum.SPADES 
        || this === BridgeSuiteEnum.CLUBS) {
      return ColorEnum.BLACK;
    } else {
      return ColorEnum.RED;
    }
  }
}
 
class BridgeSuitEnumType extends Enum {
  SPADES: BridgeSuit = new BridgeSuit('Spades', true);
  HEARTS: BridgeSuit = new BridgeSuit('Hearts', true);
  DIAMONDS: BridgeSuit = new BridgeSuit('Diamonds');
  CLUBS: BridgeSuit = new BridgeSuit('Clubs');
 
  constructor() {
    super();
    this.initEnum('BridgeSuit');
  }
 
  // can also have methods on the overall type
  get majors(): BridgeSuit[] {
    return this.values.filter((suit: BridgeSuit ) => suit.isMajor);
  }
}
 
const BridgeSuitEnum: BridgeSuitEnumType = 
  new BridgeSuitEnumType();
 
console.log(BridgeSuitEnum.HEARTS.color.toString()); // Color.RED
console.log(BridgeSuitEnum.HEARTS.isMajor); // true
// ```
 
## More information
 
* The directory [test/](test) contains examples.
* See [ngrx-example-app-enums](https://github.com/LMFinney/ngrx-example-app-enums) for a more complicated implementation supporting an [@ngrx](https://github.com/ngrx/store) app.