Hello, I maintain a large document archive and I often use bit fields to record the status of my documents during processing or when validating them. My legacy code simply uses static int constants such as: static int DOCUMENT_STATUS_NO_STATE = 0 static int DOCUMENT_STATUS_OK = 1 static int DOCUMENT_STATUS_NO_TIF_FILE = 2 static int DOCUMENT_STATUS_NO_PDF_FILE = 4 This makes it pretty easy to indicate the state a document is in, by setting the appropriate flags. For example: status = DOCUMENT_STATUS_NO_TIF_FILE | DOCUMENT_STATUS_NO_PDF_FILE; Since the approach of using static constants is bad practice and because I would like to improve the code, I was looking to use Enums to achieve the same. There are a few requirements, one of them being the need to save the status into a database as a numeric type. So there is a need to transform the enumeration constants to a numeric value. Below is my first approach and I wonder if this is the correct way to go about this? class DocumentStatus{ public enum StatusFlag { DOCUMENT_STATUS_NOT_DEFINED(1<<0), DOCUMENT_STATUS_OK(1<<1), DOCUMENT_STATUS_MISSING_TID_DIR(1<<2), DOCUMENT_STATUS_MISSING_TIF_FILE(1<<3), DOCUMENT_STATUS_MISSING_PDF_FILE(1<<4), DOCUMENT_STATUS_MISSING_OCR_FILE(1<<5), DOCUMENT_STATUS_PAGE_COUNT_TIF(1<<6), DOCUMENT_STATUS_PAGE_COUNT_PDF(1<<7), DOCUMENT_STATUS_UNAVAILABLE(1<<8), private final long statusFlagValue; StatusFlag(long statusFlagValue) { this.statusFlagValue = statusFlagValue } public long getStatusFlagValue(){ return statusFlagValue } } /** * Translates a numeric status code into a Set of StatusFlag enums * @param numeric statusValue * @return EnumSet representing a documents status */ public EnumSet<StatusFlag> getStatusFlags(long statusValue) { EnumSet statusFlags = EnumSet.noneOf(StatusFlag.class) StatusFlag.each { statusFlag -> long flagValue = statusFlag.statusFlagValue if ( (flagValue&statusValue ) == flagValue ) { statusFlags.add(statusFlag) } } return statusFlags } /** * Translates a set of StatusFlag enums into a numeric status code * @param Set if statusFlags * @return numeric representation of the document status */ public long getStatusValue(Set<StatusFlag> flags) { long value=0 flags.each { statusFlag -> value|=statusFlag.getStatusFlagValue() } return value } public static void main(String[] args) { DocumentStatus ds = new DocumentStatus(); Set statusFlags = EnumSet.of( StatusFlag.DOCUMENT_STATUS_OK, StatusFlag.DOCUMENT_STATUS_UNAVAILABLE) assert ds.getStatusValue( statusFlags )==258 // 0000.0001|0000.0010 long numericStatusCode = 56 statusFlags = ds.getStatusFlags(numericStatusCode) assert !statusFlags.contains(StatusFlag.DOCUMENT_STATUS_OK) assert statusFlags.contains(StatusFlag.DOCUMENT_STATUS_MISSING_TIF_FILE) assert statusFlags.contains(StatusFlag.DOCUMENT_STATUS_MISSING_PDF_FILE) assert statusFlags.contains(StatusFlag.DOCUMENT_STATUS_MISSING_OCR_FILE) } }