How do I declare a class property as an enum type

Question

I want to declare a custom enum such as:

enum menuItemType
{
    LinkInternal = 0,
    LinkExternal = 1,
    Image = 2,
    Movie = 3,
    MapQuery = 4
}

As a type for my object:

@interface MenuItem : NSObject {    
    NSMutableString *menuId;
    NSMutableString *title;
    enum menuItemType *menuType;
    NSMutableArray *subMenuItems;
}

But am unsure where I need to put the enum definition - if I put it before the @interface its syntactically incorrect

Answer 1

Just updating this in case someone stumbles upon this in our future times.

Since iOS 6 / Mac OS X 10.8, the new NS_ENUM and NS_OPTIONS macros are the preferred way to declare enum types.

In that case, it would look like:

typedef NS_ENUM(NSInteger, MenuItemType) {
    LinkInternal = 0,
    LinkExternal = 1,
    Image = 2,
    Movie = 3,
    MapQuery = 4
};

@interface MenuItem : NSObject {    
    NSMutableString *menuId;
    NSMutableString *title;
    MenuItemType menuType;
    NSMutableArray *subMenuItems;
}

A good read on the subject: http://nshipster.com/ns_enum-ns_options/

You might also want to conform to Apple's conventions for enum naming and go for something like:

typedef NS_ENUM(NSInteger, MenuItemType) {
    MenuItemTypeLinkInternal = 0,
    MenuItemTypeLinkExternal = 1,
    MenuItemTypeImage = 2,
    MenuItemTypeMovie = 3,
    MenuItemTypeMapQuery = 4
};

Hope this will help.