Use enums to store data in database or just use a string?

[inner kayak]

I have a project where on the frontend you select from options, Easy medium and hard and on the backend I have a enum that represents the same data. When I save the data to the database it saves in correctly, difficulty will be EASY, MEDIUM or HARD, but when I fetch the data to display it on the frontend the difficulty value may say MEDIUM but if I compare it to the string MEDIUM so i can conditionally apply some CSS they are not the same type. Is this because an enum is really a string and when I make the comparison its always false cause the types are different?

    @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
    private Difficulty difficulty;

public enum Difficulty {
    EASY("easy"),
    MEDIUM("medium"),
    HARD("hard");

    private String difficulty;
    Difficulty(String difficulty) {
        this.difficulty = difficulty;
    }

    public String getDifficulty() {
        return difficulty;
    }

    public void setDifficulty(String difficulty) {
        this.difficulty = difficulty;
    }
}

<th:block th:switch="${build.difficulty}">
  <span class="badge rounded-pill text-bg-success" th:case="EASY" th:text="${build.difficulty}"></span>
  <span class="badge rounded-pill text-bg-warning" th:case="MEDIUM" th:text="${build.difficulty}">       </span>
  <span class="badge rounded-pill text-bg-danger" th:case="HARD" th:text="${build.difficulty}"></span>
</th:block>

[rough flare]

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[stone bronze]

I'm not sure what you mean. You're actually comparing your enums to Strings here.
It's because enums aren't strings, that it wouldn't match

[inner kayak]

Doesn't this annotation save the enum's as strings in the database so when I retrieve them wouldn't they be strings?

 @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
    private Difficulty difficulty;

Maybe im over complicating this, and I should just use Strings? But then someone could open up the inspector and modify my select options and pass in w.e they want

[stone bronze]

Of course not, when you retrieve them they're back in your entity

Your entity uses type Difficulty, not String

[stone bronze]

Note that sooner or later you'll need to learn to add an input data validation step before accepting whatever you're given, so it's not really the reason to keep enums

[inner kayak]

i plan to add input validation, I decided to try to use enums in this project and they are just arent making sense to me. I thought by using them I limit that possible selections someone has access to but the way im using them is clearly wrong.

[stone bronze]

Fundamentally, it rather gives me the impression that Thymeleaf's switch/case constructs suck and that Thymeleaf's enum support in particular is atrocious

But maybe they supposedly support them in a saner way and it's just the examples that suck

[inner kayak]

So then in ur opinion would it be a better idea to just set difficulty as a String instead of an enum, and then just validate the input to insure that only 1 of those 3 options is passed to the backend?

[stone bronze]

Meh. In my opinion I'd wonder whether you couldn't do better than this switch/case thing.
But if it truly becomes so annoying, you can convert an enum to Stringby calling name() on it, you know

[inner kayak]

I've been trying to get this working since yesterday and finally caved and decided to ask for help. I'm not too familiar with thymeleaf, but since I'm learning spring boot I figured id try to make a project with it instead of using React. When I googled how to conditionally render a class there was a few options, but the switch case seemed like the best option because I had more than 2 possible options I needed to handle.

Dumb question, what if I made a DTO that mapped the String value that is passed from the frontend to the backend and then based on the string map it to the corresponding enum?

[stone bronze]

i have no idea what you hope to gain by involving strings where an enum model is involved. But why not if you see what you gain from it

[inner kayak]

I don't understand how I can't involve strings. If thymleaf doesn't recognize the value MEDIUM that comes from the enum as being the same as "MEDIUM", how can I conditionally render my classes? JavaScript doesn't have a enum type so how would it know what a enum is. I figured it has to be converted to a string then so i can compare the same types.

[rough flare]

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