Question

For a Unity3d game I’m working on, I have a situation where I want a read/writeable property with a trivial getter, but a setter which does some more work. My code looks like this:

// IColor.cs
interface IColor {
    Color colorPainted { get; set; }
}

// Player.cs
public class Player : Monobehaviour, IColor {
    // ...
    public Color colorPainted {
        get { }
        set {
            colorPainted = value;
            // some other code
        }
     // ...
    }
}

I’m not sure what to do about the get part, though. I can’t return colorPainted;, because that causes a stack overflow. The code as written won’t compile because I’m not returning a value.

I’m no C# wizard, but it seems like I’d need to have a _colorPainted backing variable, and provide access to that through the get and set. This seems kinda verbose, though — is there a better way to do it? In Objective-C, I’d simply leave the getter unimplemented, but that doesn’t seem to work.

Answer 1

Unfortunately in C# there’s no way around it. You need to provide a backing field for the property:

// Player.cs

private Color _colorPainted;

public class Player : Monobehaviour, IColor {
    // ...
    public Color colorPainted {
        get { return _colorPainted; }
        set {
            _colorPainted = value;
            // some other code
        }
     // ...
    }
}