Use case of nesting an enum into a struct

Question

At our office there is this piece of code (the original author isn't employed anymore, so I can't ask him).
Does anybody have an idea, what he did there? Is there any advantage of using this struct OrderDirection instead directly the enum Direction?
(for me, this is interesting and I just wanted to know why.)
public struct OrderDirection 
{
    private enum Direction
    {
        Ascending = 0,
        Descending = 1
    }
    
    private OrderDirection(Direction direction)
    {
        _direction = direction;
    }
    
    private readonly Direction _direction;
    
    public override string ToString()
    {
        switch(_direction)
        {
            case Direction.Ascending: return "asc";
            case Direction.Descending: return "desc";
            default: throw new NotImplementedException(nameof(_direction));
        }
    }
    
    public static OrderDirection Ascending = new OrderDirection(Direction.Ascending);
    public static OrderDirection Descending = new OrderDirection(Direction.Descending);
}

iSR5 · Answer

as OOP as is, I think this would avoid unneeded castings, and it gives you more managed approach to handle enum than using enum directly.
If enum was used directly, it would be possible to cast it to different type than a string, and it will make your hands tight when it comes to handle exceptions. so using struct with an internal enum would force typing it to only accept and output specified types, which avoid unnecessary exceptions and give you more OOP options to work with.
This is also a security approach where it adds restrictions on the input-output. In this case, avoiding SQL Injections.
Obviously it can be done in different approaches, however, this implementation would avoid some of the human-errors (like misspelling), and overriding. It would also add more readability and maintainability to the code and avoiding redundancy with less code possible.

Peter Csala · Answer

In my opinion nothing indicate the use of enum.
According to my understanding your object provides the following functionalities from consumer perspective:

Provide two factory methods one for Ascending and another for Descending
Provide custom string representation (abbreviation) for these

From the public interface point of view the following implementation is equivalent with yours
public struct OrderDirection 
{
    private readonly string _direction;
    private OrderDirection(string direction)
    {
        _direction = direction;
    }
      
    public override string ToString() => _direction;
    
    public static OrderDirection Ascending = new OrderDirection("asc");
    public static OrderDirection Descending = new OrderDirection("desc");
}

Use case of nesting an enum into a struct

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