ardalis/SmartEnum

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2443 stars · 182 forks observed · 2026-10-07

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A C# base class library for creating strongly-typed enum alternatives with behavior, lookup by name or value, and rich integration support. It ships companion packages for EF Core, Dapper, System.Text.Json, Json.NET, and AutoFixture.

Use cases

• replace C# enums with strongly typed classes
• persist smart enums with EF Core
• serialize enums as names with System.Text.Json or Json.NET
• map smart enums with Dapper
• implement value objects in domain-driven design
• look up enum instances by name or value

When to choose

• you need enums with behavior or additional properties in .NET
• you follow DDD and want type-safe value objects instead of primitive enums
• you need enum persistence and JSON serialization integrations out of the box

When to avoid

• you only need simple flags or constants with no behavior
• your project is not on .NET/C#
• you want to avoid extra dependencies for trivial enum use cases

Facets

library · maturity stable

serialization type-system orm developer-tools programming-languages backend dotnet c smart-enum enum-alternative domain-driven-design ddd value-object efcore dapper system-text-json jsonnet nuget

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