Serialization of enums as strings in Unity3d.
Kudos to my colleague Vasyl Romanets for an idea how to make this solution cleaner
Unity3d serializes enums as ints. This causes the problem when new enumerators of enum are inserted before the last enumerator: it "suddenly" turns out that previously serialized enums have wrong values.
Consider the following situation:
enum MyEnum
{
Zero, // 0
One, // 1
Some, // 2
Many // 3
}
public MyEnum myEnum = MyEnum.Some;
Public field myEnum is serialized as 2.
Now, if we insert a new enumerator between other enumerators of enum MyEnum:
enum MyEnum
{
Zero, // 0
One, // 1
Two, // 2
Some, // 3
Many // 4
}
field myEnum will have value Two instead of Some.
Usually this behaviour is undesirable.
Solution is simple: enum should be serialized as string instead of int.
StableEnum does that for you.
Unfortunately Unity3d does not serialize generic classes (and another stuff, like interfaces).
That's why the first thing you have to do to use StableEnums in your project is to provide concrete derived classes of StableEnum class for each enum you want to make stable.
You can use ConcreteStableEnums.cs as an example of how to do that. You can put all your concrete classes right in this file.
It's not required to provide implicit cast operator.
If cast operator is not provided, you'll have to alter enum via value property. E.g.
myEnum.value = MyEnum.SomeValue;
However, if cast operator is provided it would be possible to alter enum as easy as normal enum. E.g.
myEnum = MyEnum.SomeValue;
So, you decide.
That's not possible, because cast operator is static, and therefore can't be inherited. That's why each class derived from StableEnum must implement its own cast operator.
However, StableEnum has implementation of operator which casts from StableEnum to T.
That's why you can do this with no additional code from your side:
MyEnum enumValue = myEnum; // myEnum is an instance of the class derived from StableEnum<MyEnum>
As any thing in this world this solution has drawbacks.
- Although now you can insert/remove enumerators in/from an enum, you can't rename your enumerators because during deserialization the string which represents the old value of enumerator will be attempted to be parsed as enum's enumerator which in turn does not exist. As a result enum will receive a default value (which is the first enumerator if default values of enumerators were not specified).
- Since StableEnums use inheritance they are implemented via classes which are reference types, contrary to enums which are value types, with all ensuing consequences like boxing, GC allocs etc. So the main purpose of StableEnum is to store an enum as a serialized field.
- Also current version of StableEnums does not support bit field enumerations (e.g. those with FlagsAttribute).