Dealing with multiple generics in a method call
- by thaBadDawg
I've been dealing a lot lately with abstract classes that use generics. This is all good and fine because I get a lot of utility out of these classes but now it's making for some rather ugly code down the line. For example:
abstract class ClassBase<T>
{
T Property { get; set; }
}
class MyClass : ClassBase<string>
{
OtherClass PropertyDetail { get; set; }
}
This implementation isn't all that crazy, except when I want to reference the abstract class from a helper class and then I have to make a list of generics just to make reference to the implemented class, like this below.
class Helper
{
void HelpMe<C, T>(object Value)
where C : ClassBase<T>, new()
{
DoWork();
}
}
This is just a tame example, because I have some method calls where the list of where clauses end up being 5 or 6 lines long to handle all of the generic data. What I'd really like to do is
class Helper
{
void HelpMe<C>(object Value)
where C : ClassBase, new()
{
DoWork();
}
}
but it obviously won't compile. I want to reference ClassBase without having to pass it a whole array of generic classes to get the function to work, but I don't want to reference the higher level classes because there are a dozen of those. Am I the victim of my own cleverness or is there an avenue that I haven't considered yet?
