C# Property Access vs Interface Implementation
- by ehdv
I'm writing a class to represent a Pivot Collection, the root object recognized by Pivot. A Collection has several attributes, a list of facet categories (each represented by a FacetCategory object) and a list of items (each represented by a PivotItem object). Therefore, an extremely simplified Collection reads:
public class Collection
{
private List<FacetCategory> categories;
private List<PivotItem> items;
// other attributes
}
What I'm unsure of is how to properly grant access to those two lists. Because declaration order of both facet categories and items is visible to the user, I can't use sets, but the class also shouldn't allow duplicate categories or items. Furthermore, I'd like to make the Collection object as easy to use as possible. So my choices are:
Have Collection implement IList<PivotItem> and have accessor methods for FacetCategory: In this case, one would add an item to Collection foo by writing foo.Add(bar). This works, but since a Collection is equally both kinds of list making it only pass as a list for one type (category or item) seems like a subpar solution.
Create nested wrapper classes for List (CategoryList and ItemList). This has the advantage of making a consistent interface but the downside is that these properties would no longer be able to serve as lists (because I need to override the non-virtual Add method I have to implement IList rather than subclass List. Implicit casting wouldn't work because that would return the Add method to its normal behavior.
Also, for reasons I can't figure out, IList is missing an AddRange method...
public class Collection
{
private class CategoryList: IList<FacetCategory>
{
// ...
}
private readonly CategoryList categories = new CategoryList();
private readonly ItemList items = new ItemList();
public CategoryList FacetCategories
{
get { return categories; }
set { categories.Clear(); categories.AddRange(value); }
}
public ItemList Items
{
get { return items; }
set { items.Clear(); items.AddRange(value); }
}
}
Finally, the third option is to combine options one and two, so that Collection implements IList<PivotItem> and has a property FacetCategories.
Question: Which of these three is most appropriate, and why?
