Technological Thoughts by Jerome Kehrli

I remember the introduction of the brand new enum type in Java 5 (1.5) was a very exciting announce. However, when I finally switched from 1.4 to 1.5 and actually tried Java's flavoured enum types, I was a bit disappointed.

Before that, I was using Josh Bloch's "Typesafe enum" pattern (effective java) for quite a long time and I didn't really see what was so much better with the new Java native enum construction. Ok, fine, there was the ability to use enum instances in switch - case statements which seemed fine, but what else ?

Besides, what I used to find great with the "typesafe enum" pattern is that it could be tricked and changed the way I wanted, for instance to be able to dynamically (at runtime) add enum instances to a specific typesafe enum class. I found it very disappointing not to be able to do the very same thing easily with the native Java enum construction.

And now you might wonder "Why the hell could one ever need to dynamically add enum values ?!?". You do, right ? Well, let's imagine this scenario:

You have a specific column in a DB table which contains various codes as values. There are more than hundred different codes actually in use in this column. Related to this, you have a business logic which performs different operations on the rows coming from this table, the actual kind of operation applied on the row depends on the value of this code. So there are chance you end up with a lot of if - elseif statements checking the actual value of the code.
I myself am allergic to using string comparison in conditions so I want to be able to map the values from this column to an enum type in Java. This way I can compare enum values instead of strings in my conditions and reduce my dependency on the format of the string value.

Now when there are more than a hundred different possible codes in the DB I really don't have any intent to define them all manually in my enum type. I want to define only the few I am actually using the Java code and let the system add the other ones dynamically, at runtime, when it (the ORM system or whatever I am using for reading the DB rows) encounters a new value from the DB.

Hence my need for dynamically added enum values.

So recently I faced this need once again and took a few hours to build a little solution which enables one to dynamically add values to a Java enum type. The solution is the following :