Embedding a displayable form in enums?

Question

Hi,
Java coding best practices suggest that enum values are spcified in upper case.
Something like:
public enum WeekDay { SUN, MON, TUE, WED, THU, FRI, SAT; };However, when displaying a single value you would normally want to display in a prettier way.
You would like to see for example the value SUN displayed as "Sunday".
I thought of embedding the view of the value into the enum the following way:
public enum WeekDay {
  SUN("Sunday"),
  MON("Monday"),
  TUE("Tuesday"),
  WED("Wednesday"),
  THU("Thursday"),
  FRI("Friday"),
  SAT("Saterday");
private final String view; // viewable form
    WeekDay(String view) {
      this.view = view;
    private String view() {
      return view;
};So when you want to print the value you can do something like:
System.out.println(WeekDay.SUN.view());I supose that you should only consider using this if you normally have only one way of showing the value (so in this case it is a bit problematic because you will not get other forms of the value, such as "Sun") and it also does not work for localised values.
But for a short list of values with one way of viewing each value, in a single language, it looks acceptable to me.
What do you think?
Madala

Answer 1

madala wrote:
So you would use a switch statement to convert to the human readable form in the toString()?No, you could code toString() exactly as you coded view() in your example.
Or, in some cases, I have enums where most of the names are understandable and only some of the toString() methods are overridden (you can override it for specific values).