Web Applications with Javascript or Java

10Enumerations and Enumeration Attributes

10.1Enumerations

In all application domains, there are string-valued attributes with a fixed list of possible string values. These attributes are called enumeration attributes, and the fixed value lists defining their possible string values are called enumerations. For instance, when we have to manage data about people, we often need to include information about their gender. The possible values of a gender attribute may be restricted to one of the enumeration labels “male”,”female” and “undetermined”, or to one of the enumeration codes “M”, “F” and “U”. Whenever we deal with codes, we also need to have their corresponding labels, at least in a legend explaining the meaning of each code.

Instead of using ...