Is there a way to get the enums in VBA?

Question

Is there a way to get the enums in VBA? Something like this example for C#, but for VBA?

using System;

class EnumsExampleZ
{
    private enum SiteNames
    {
        SomeSample = 1,
        SomeOtherSample = 2,
        SomeThirdSample = 3
    }

    static void Main()
    {
        Type enumType = typeof(SiteNames);
        string[] enumName = enumType.GetEnumNames();

        for (int i = 0; i < enumName.Length; i++)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(enumName[i]);
        }
    }
}

Lets say we have the following:

Enum FruitType
    Apple = 1
    Orange = 2
    Plum = 3
End Enum

How can we display on the immediate window these:

Apple
Orange
Plum

Answer 1

There is no built-in function, though it is easy enough to roll your own in a concrete case:

Enum FruitType
    Apple = 1
    Orange = 2
    Plum = 3
End Enum

Function EnumName(i As Long) As String
    EnumName = Array("Apple","Orange","Plum")(i-1)
End Function

If you have several different enums, you could add a parameter which is the string name of the enum and Select Case on it.

Having said all this, it might possible to do something with scripting the VBA editor, though it is unlikely to be worth it (IMHO).

Answer 2

Parsing the VBA code yourself with the VBIDE Extensibility library is going to appear nice & simple at first, and then you're going to hit edge cases and soon realize that you need to actually implement that part of the VBA spec in order to properly and successfully parse every possible way to define an enum in VBA.

I'd go with the simple solution.

That said Rubberduck is doing pretty much exactly that, and exposes an experimental COM API that allows you to enumerate all declarations (and their references) in the VBE, effectively empowering your VBA code with reflection-like capabilities; as of 2.0.11 (the latest release), the code would look something like this:

Public Enum TestEnum
    Foo
    Bar
End Enum

Public Sub ListEnums()
    With New Rubberduck.ParserState
        .Initialize Application.VBE
        .Parse
        Dim item As Variant
        For Each item In .UserDeclarations
            Dim decl As Rubberduck.Declaration
            Set decl = item
            If decl.DeclarationType = DeclarationType_EnumerationMember Then
                Debug.Print decl.ParentDeclaration.Name & "." & decl.Name
            End If
        Next
    End With
End Sub

And in theory would output this:

TestEnum.Foo
TestEnum.Bar

However we (ok, I did) broke something around the 2.0.9 release, so if you try that in 2.0.11 you'll get a runtime error complaining about an invalid cast:

That should be is an easy fix that we'll patch up by 2.0.12, but note that at that point the API is still experimental and very much subject to change (feature requests are welcome!), so I wouldn't recommend using it for anything other than toy projects.