Consistency when using EnumItem name or value

Feature Requests Engine Features
#1

When setting an EnumItem property on an instance, you can set it to the EnumItem, the name of the EnumItem, or the value of the EnumItem.

Baseplate.Material = Enum.Material.Concrete
Baseplate.Material = "Concrete"
Baseplate.Material = 816

Will all set the baseplate’s material to Concrete.
However, this isn’t the case for the constructors of some data types.

Axes - Doesn’t work with EnumItem name, or EnumItem Value.
DockWidgetPluginGuiInfo - Doesn’t work with EnumItem name
Faces - Doesn’t work with EnumItem name, or EnumItem Value.
PathWaypoint - Doesn’t work with EnumItem name, or EnumItem Value.
PhysicalProperties - Doesn’t work with EnumItem name, or EnumItem Value.
TweenInfo - Doesn’t work with EnumItem name

5 Likes
#2

Could you elaborate further on which properties don’t work with enum names and values? (Any example of script and it’s result)

At the moment the only method I have in mind that could not work witu those is ContextActionService:BindAction as it allows to bind it using either Enum.KeyCode or Enum.UserInputType.

#3

That’s because the things you just listed aren’t Enums, they’re atomic data types. Enums have a lot of special behavior that the other atomic data types don’t (and in some cases, can’t) have.

Is what you’re asking for to be able to make a string based assignment like this:

part.Position = "123, 4.5, 6"

There’s a good reason that you can’t do that, because the string representation of a value may be locale dependent. It’s also not very forward compatible because it breaks if we ever want to change the string representation of one of the types.

2 Likes
#4

No.

I’m asking about using EnumItem name/value when constructing certain data types.

For example:

local info = TweenInfo.new(1,"Quad","Out",0,false,0)

or

local Axes = Axes.new(0,1,2)
#5

Yeah, sorry for the confusion.

This is going to be a WontFix, as we’re likely going to be soft-deprecating implicit enum casts like that soon. (Soft deprecating = not supporting it on new types, but never actually removing it because so much existing stuff relies on it)