Recently, I ran into a problem , where I need to iterate through an enum, and get a localized description of its member. As an example, I’ll use enum Faculties.

public enum Faculties
{
    Engineeering=1,
    Economy=2,
    Physchology=3,
    Law=4,
    Pharmacy=5
}

Since we’re doing localization we need to create resx file and localized resx (in this example I use Indonesian culture), and assign value for each enum member. Don’t forget to set resource access modifier to public.

How do we connect enum member with resource file? We can use a DescriptionAttribute and add it to all enum members. The trick here is we set the description to strongly type property name .

So here is our final enum:

public enum Faculties
{
    [Description("Faculties_Engineering")]
    Engineering = 1,

    [Description("Faculties_Economy")]
    Economy = 2,
        
    [Description("Faculties_Physchology")]
    Physchology = 3,
        
    [Description("Faculties_Law")]
    Law = 4,
        
    [Description("Faculties_Pharmacy")]
    Pharmacy = 5
}

And finally we add extension method for Faculties enum

public static class Extensions
{
    public static string ToLocalizedString(this Faculties val)
    {
         DescriptionAttribute[] attributes = (DescriptionAttribute[])val.GetType().GetField(val.ToString()).GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute), false);
         string description = attributes.Length > 0 ? attributes[0].Description : string.Empty;
         string result = string.Empty;
         if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(description))
         {
             result = typeof(LanguageResource).GetProperty(description).GetValue(null, null) as string;
         }
         return result;
    }
} 

Here is the output of iterating Faculties enum in Indonesian culture:

LocalizedEnum.7z (7.12 kb)