Passing enumeration class into functions. Best practice?

Hello,

I have an enumeration defined like this:

classdef myEnum < uint8
    enumeration
        A (0)
        B (1)
        C (2)
    end
    methods (Static)
        function out = getDefaultValue()
            out = myEnum.B;
        end
    end
end

and I want to pass the myEnum class into a function like this:

function out = myCaster(in,enum)
% example function with regular enum construction and enum-specific function call
try
    out = enum(in);
catch
    out = enum.getDefaultValue();
end
end

Obviously, this doesn't work as I can't simply call

>> myCaster(1,myEnum)
Error using myEnum
Input does not correspond to a member of the enumeration class 'myEnum'.

with the classname.

However, I can pass

• A function handle to the classname "@myEnum"
• A string of the classname 'myEnum'

as arguments to the function.

The issue now is that with the first option, I can only call the enum constructor and not the enum-specific functions, e.g.,

enum = @myEnum;
enum(1) % works
enum.getDefaultValue() % fails

With the second option, I'd have to use the 'eval' function (which should be avoided in most cases)

enum = 'myEnum';
eval([enum,'(1)']) % works
eval([enum,'.getDefaultValue()']) % works

My question now:

What is the best practice in that case? Am I missing a clever way to pass an enumeration class as a function argument? If possible, I want to avoid the usage of 'eval' wherever possible.

[chrisw23]

You can only pass an object as an argument. In your case this will be a member of your enumeration.

myCaster(1,myEnum.<member>) % just to demonstrate

All methods of your enum class are member methods. So if you want to call the getDefaultValue method, it would be

defVal = myEnum.<member>.getDefaultValue()

[Michael Zauner]

Thank you for the info! But how would I now call the constructor method e.g., myEnum(1) with a member?