Assigning a string value to an enums and then finding the enum by value

Question

I want to have an enum like the output below, and then have a method (something like Util.FindFruitByValue("A")) which returns the enum Apple. This is because the abbreviations are stored in a database and I need to convert them to appropriate enums after reading from the db.

This is like a lookup table, but the difference is the value is a string instead of an int. I am populating a business object by reading the values from database, and I would like to use a type with fixed values for the object property instead of a string.

Is this possible? Do I need to create a separate class for it?

public enum Fruit
{
    Apple = "A"
    Banana = "B"
    Cherry = "C"
}

Answer 1

I solved the problem by using the Description attribute on the enum. the solution is as follows. I use the extension method to get the description. the code to get the description is taken from this link http://blog.spontaneouspublicity.com/post/2008/01/17/Associating-Strings-with-enums-in-C.aspx. thanks for your replies.

    public enum Fruit
{
    [Description("Apple")]
    A,
    [Description("Banana")]
    B,
    [Description("Cherry")]
    C
}

public static class Util
{
    public static T StringToEnum<T>(string name)
    {
        return (T)Enum.Parse(typeof(T), name);
    }

    public static string ToDescriptionString(this Enum value)
    {
        FieldInfo fi = value.GetType().GetField(value.ToString());

        DescriptionAttribute[] attributes =
            (DescriptionAttribute[])fi.GetCustomAttributes(
            typeof(DescriptionAttribute),
            false);

        if (attributes != null &&
            attributes.Length > 0)
            return attributes[0].Description;
        else
            return value.ToString();
    }
}