Enum TryParse Extension Method

TryParse method is very helpful if you need to convert string representation of a value to a value itself. TryParse is better than Parse method because it doesn’t throw any exceptions and just returns a Boolean value to indicate weather the parsing was successful. Surprisingly there is no TryParse method available to use for Enum and this is where extension method can be extremely useful.

public static bool TryParse<T>(this Enum theEnum, string valueToParse, out T returnValue)
{
    returnValue = default(T);
    int intEnumValue;
    if (Int32.TryParse(valueToParse, out intEnumValue))
    {
        if (Enum.IsDefined(typeof(T), intEnumValue))
        {
            returnValue = (T)(object)intEnumValue;
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

Now it’s time to test our extension method! Here I have a simple UserType Enumeration

public enum UserType
{
    None = 0,
    Administrator = 1,
    Manager = 2,
    Consultant = 3
}

Usage:

currentUserType.TryParse(Request.QueryString["usertype"], out currentUserType);