Question

Can I freely add additional operations in C# public property’s getter and setter? To what extent?
For example, would the following piece of code be okay (returning and editing a collection which is nested into another collection)?

public ObservableCollection<MyEntity> MyCollection
{
   get
   {
     return myColl.Where(p => p.Name == myName).FirstOrDefault().AnotherCollection;
   }
   private set
   {
     myColl.Where(p => p.Name == myName).FirstOrDefault().AnotherCollection = value;
   }
}

Answer 1

The only bound is the semantics. You may use whatever operations you find suitable, as long as the general property semantics is preserved. Among others, I would check that

• access is reasonably fast
• if setter finished w/o error, getter should return the value semantically compatible with the set value
• if possible, avoid raising exceptions inside
• consecutive gets return semantically equivalent values if internal state didn’t change

If you keep the semantics, IMHO any operation is allowed.