Binding Enum to ComboBox

Hi,

Whether it’s Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation While working with ComboBox, we usually want to bind any list as ComboBox Items.

For example,

//In windows forms
string[] names = { “Microsoft”, “IBM”, “Apple” };
cmbNames.DataSource = names;  //cmbNames is comboBox ID

or

//In windows presentation foundation
string[] names = { “Microsoft”, “IBM”, “Apple”};
cmbNames.ItemsSource = names;  //cmbNames is comboBox ID

That’s simple! But today I wanted to convert enum constants into an array of string and I wanted to make it ItemsSource of combo. So I created an enum type “Names” and tried that

public enum Names
{ 
    Microsoft, 
    IBM, 
    Apple
}

Names nameList;
cmbNames.ItemsSource = nameList ; //compile time error-

A compile time error is raised claiming that Cannot implicitly convert type ‘Names’ to ‘System.Collections.IEnumerable’. So i searched for that and find a good single line solution 🙂

//For WPF
cmbNames.ItemsSource = Enum.GetNames(typeof(Names));

//and In windows forms
cmbNames.DataSource = Enum.GetNames(typeof(Names));

It will convert enum contants into string[]. To convert back from string to constant you can use Enum.Parse(…).

Nice Feature! Isn’t it?