Automatic generation of enum members from name Strings

Question

I have a program in which I read information about Target objects from a text file. I store some of this information as an enum property of the target.
}else if (itemKey.equalsIgnoreCase( "type")) {
currentTarget.descriptor= itemValue;
currentTarget.type = Target.getTargetType(currentTarget.descriptor);And elsewhere in the program I do the file reading and assignment of instance variables:
class Target{
enum TargetType {COUGH_DROP, RICE_CRACKER, PEPTO_BISMOL,UNDETERMINED};
String descriptor;
TargetType type;
returns the target' s type as specified by a descriptor
public static TargetType getTargetType (String descriptorString) {
if (descriptorString.equals( "rice cracker")) {
return (TargetType.RICE_CRACKER);
} else if (descriptorString.equals ("cough drop")){
return (TargetType.COUGH_DROP);
} else if (descriptorString.equals ("Pepto-Bismol")){
return (TargetType.PEPTO_BISMOL);
} else {
return (TargetType.UNDETERMINED);
} I would like to be able to automatically generate the members of the TargetType enum from a list of strings as opposed to needing a method such as getTargetType above. Is this possible?
Regards,
Joe
PS: I completely apologize for the appearance of the code above. I have no idea why this editor removed my indentation and added HTML markers. (I copied the code from a text editor, pasted into this editor, selected the code sections and clicked on the code button )
PPS I now see that after a couple of switches between preview and rich text in the HTML markers have disappeared. WTF?

Answer 1

I'm very curious to understand why one would like to create enum constants at run time? How can therse enums be used in the code that is not created at runtime? What are you really trying to achieve
I know you marked your question as answered, but... you may have a look at the code below. It is a very very simple example of how to map real life descriptions (at runtime) to pre-existing enums. I didn't test it, but for all I know it should just work. Does this solve the problem that you are experiencing?
import java.util.HashSet;
import java.util.Set;
public enum TargetType {
    RICE_CRACKER("C:/Descriptions/RiceCrackers.txt"),
    COUGH_DROP("C:/Descriptions/CouphDrops.txt"),
    PEPTO_BISMOL("C:/Descriptions/PeptoBismol.txt"),
    UNDETERMINED("C:/Descriptions/Empty.txt"),
    public static TargetType getType(String description) {
     for (TargetType targetType : TargetType.values()) {
         if (targetType.contains(description)) {
          return targetType;
     return UNDETERMINED;
    private final String fileName;
    private Set<String> descriptions = null;
    private TargetType(String fileName) {
     this.fileName = fileName;
    private boolean contains(String description) {
     if (descriptions == null) {
         descriptions = new HashSet<String>();
          * Populate descriptions from fileName.
     return descriptions.contains(description);
}Piet