Question

Can I somehow get a reference to the instance I am creating using object initialiser

var x = new TestClass
           {
                 Id = 1,
                 SomeProperty = SomeMethod(this)
           }

“this” should point to the new TestClass instance I’m creating. But it obviously refers the the instance of the class in which this code resides.

I’m not asking if this is a good way to do this.
I’m aware that I can do this like this:

var x = new TestClass {Id= x};
x.SomeProperty = SomeMethod(this);

I have a complicated scenario, in which a reference to the new instance in the object initialiser would make life easier.

Is this possible in any way?

Answer 1

There’s no way around it, the C# specification explicitly says that “It is not possible for an object or collection initializer to refer to the object instance being initialized.”

As for why it’s impossible, I suspect that there’s just no nice way to implement it. We want some syntactic sugar equivalent to

var temp = new TestClass();
temp.Id = 1;
temp.SomeProperty = SomeMethod(temp);
x = temp;

We just need a keyword to refer to temp within the initializer, but none is easily available. We can’t use this because it already means something outside the initializer. Should SomeProperty = this.SomeMethod(this) be equivalent to temp.SomeProperty = this.SomeMethod(temp) or temp.SomeProperty = temp.SomeMethod(temp)? The second is consistent, but then what happens if we need the first?

We could try to use x, though we can only pick a name if the new object is immediately assigned to a variable. However, we now can’t refer to the old value of x inside the initializer, doing the equivalent of temp.SomeProperty = SomeMethod(x).

We could reuse the value keyword from property setters. This sounds good since value already stands in for the missing parameter if you consider a property getter to be syntactic sugar for a set_SomeProperty(value) method. Using it to also refer to the missing variable in the object initializer looks promising. However, we could be creating this object inside a property setter, in which case value is already being used, and we need to be able to do temp.SomeProperty = SomeMethod(value).

It looks like we’ll have to create a new keyword just for this purpose, maybe newthis. However, this is a breaking change to the language because any code that has a variable called newthis doesn’t work any more. Microsoft generally needs a really good reason to introduce breaking changes, so it’s better to forbid access to the object being initialized.