Method for deriving a string from an enum - objective-c

Question

I've been wondering if there's an elegant way to derive a string from an enum in Objective-C or vanilla C. I'm currently using a switch statement like so:
switch (self.requestType)
{
case MSListRequest:
serverRequestType = #"List";
break;
case MSDetailsRequest:
serverRequestType = #"Details";
break;
case MSPurchaseRequest:
serverRequestType = #"PurchaseVolume";
break;
}
I'm curious if there's a cleaner way to derive strings than this.
-edit:
I'm also using the same enum elsewhere to interface to a different system that needs to map the same enums to a different set of strings.

Answer 1

There's no real nice way to do this. A very simple way is to create an array:
NSString *const ENUM_NAMES[] = {
#"List", #"Details", #"PurchaseVolume", ...
};
There are alternatives that use macros and some simple preprocessor hacks to define both the names and the enum itself from the same source. However, the resulting code is more difficult to read.
// some_enum.def
X(List),
X(Details),
X(PurchaseVolume)
// some_enum.h
enum {
#define X(x) x
#include "some_enum.def"
#undef X
};
// some_enum.c
char const *const ENUM_STRING[] = {
#define X(x) #x
#include "some_enum.def"
#undef X
};
I'm not sure of the best way to generate an NSString from the preprocessor, whether you can just stick an # in it or if it's better to use (NSString *)CFSTR(x).
When I need a bunch of code like this, I write a Python script to generate the code from a text file -- it generates GPerf output for converting strings to enum, and it generates the code for converting enum to string as well. Plain old C doesn't do reflection.