Enum "Inheritance"

This is not possible. Enums cannot inherit from other enums. In fact all enums must actually inherit from System.Enum. C# allows syntax to change the underlying representation of the enum values which looks like inheritance, but in actuality they still inherit from System.enum.

See section 8.5.2 of the CLI spec for the full details. Relevant information from the spec

  • All enums must derive from System.Enum
  • Because of the above, all enums are value types and hence sealed

You can achieve what you want with classes:

public class Base
{
    public const int A = 1;
    public const int B = 2;
    public const int C = 3;
}
public class Consume : Base
{
    public const int D = 4;
    public const int E = 5;
}

Now you can use these classes similar as when they were enums:

int i = Consume.B;

Update (after your update of the question):

If you assign the same int values to the constants as defined in the existing enum, then you can cast between the enum and the constants, e.g:

public enum SomeEnum // this is the existing enum (from WSDL)
{
    A = 1,
    B = 2,
    ...
}
public class Base
{
    public const int A = (int)SomeEnum.A;
    //...
}
public class Consume : Base
{
    public const int D = 4;
    public const int E = 5;
}

// where you have to use the enum, use a cast:
SomeEnum e = (SomeEnum)Consume.B;

The short answer is no. You can play a bit, if you want:

You can always do something like this:

private enum Base
{
    A,
    B,
    C
}

private enum Consume
{
    A = Base.A,
    B = Base.B,
    C = Base.C,
    D,
    E
}

But, it doesn't work all that great because Base.A != Consume.A

You can always do something like this, though:

public static class Extensions
{
    public static T As<T>(this Consume c) where T : struct
    {
        return (T)System.Enum.Parse(typeof(T), c.ToString(), false);
    }
}

In order to cross between Base and Consume...

You could also cast the values of the enums as ints, and compare them as ints instead of enum, but that kind of sucks too.

The extension method return should type cast it type T.

Tags:

C#

.Net

Enums