Markupconverter WPF to ASP.NET

Question

I'm using MarkupConverters in WPF to parse from enum values to human readable strings.

Is there a way for ASP.NET and the ASP.NET GridView or DevExpress ASPxGridView to do the same as in WPF?

Something like that (from WPF) in ASP.NET:

using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Windows.Data;
using System.Windows.Markup;

namespace Converters
{
    public class PriorityToStringConverter
        : MarkupExtension, IValueConverter
    {
        public PriorityToStringConverter()
        {
        }

        public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
        {
            if (value is byte)
            {
                switch ((byte)value)
                {
                    case 0:
                        return "Very high";

                    case 1:
                        return "High";

                    case 2:
                        return "Normal";

                    case 3:
                        return "Low";

                    case 4:
                        return "Very low";

                    default:
                        return value;
                }
            }

            return value;
        }

        public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
        {
            return null;
        }

        public override object ProvideValue(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
        {
            return this;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Well, ASP.Net doesn't have built-in converters such as WPF unfortunately. What you can do is make your own custom converter to be used on an ASP.Net GridView.
Here is a short example:

Start by adding a System.ComponentModel.Description to your enum values like this:

public enum MyEnum
{
    [Description("Desc for A")]
    MyA = 0,
    [Description("Desc for X")]
    MyX,
    [Description("Desc for Y")]
    MyY
}

For the demo, my data model is a list of these:

public class MyData
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public MyEnum Value {get; set;}
}

Now, in your page create the following function which extracts the description given a specific enum value:

    public static string GetEnumDescription(Enum value)
    {
        FieldInfo fi = value.GetType().GetField(value.ToString());

        DescriptionAttribute[] attributes =
            (DescriptionAttribute[])fi.GetCustomAttributes(
            typeof(DescriptionAttribute),
            false);

        if (attributes != null && attributes.Length > 0)
            return attributes[0].Description;
        else
            return value.ToString();
    }

Usage in a GridView:

     <Columns>
        <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Value" SortExpression="Value">
            <ItemTemplate>
                <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text='<%# GetEnumDescription((Enum)Eval("Value")) %>'></asp:Label>
            </ItemTemplate>
        </asp:TemplateField>

What I basically do is after using Eval to get the Value property for a specific row, I call the function I created to extract the description, give the Enum value and that is what I display in the label.