Question

I am new to programming in C#. I guess it might be a very easy solution which I am not aware of .

Suppose I have a class file

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace sharepointproject1
{
    public partial class School
    {
        public students[] students { get; set; }
    }

    public partial class student
    {
        public marks[] marks;
        public extraactivites[] extraactivities;
    }
    public partial class marks
    {
        public int m1 { get; set; }
        public int m2 { get; set; }
    }
    public partial class extraactivities
    {
        public decimal m5;
        public decimal m6;

    }
}

Now in aspx.cs file how do I add marks to the array declared?

namespace sharepointproject1
{
    public partial class testing : usercontrol
    {
        School school = new school();
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            school.students[0].marks[0].mark1 = 45;
        }
    }
}

I need to dynamically add items to it at run time. How do I do that? Do I have to change the array to list array in the class file..Hope I am making some sense out of my question.Later I need to bind the marks to the gridview.

Please help!

Answer 1

Arrays have a fixed size – use a more flexible collection such as List<T>, which will grow as you need it to.

Eric Lippert has a good blog post about why arrays should be considered somewhat harmful.

Additionally:

• You should look into the .NET naming conventions
• Only use partial classes when you actually need to, which I suspect you don’t here
• Don’t expose public fields; use properties instead. However, don’t just expose everything as a property: consider more encapsulation. You don’t necessarily want callers to be able to replace whole collections, but just (say) add or remove students, or access them by index.
• Consider making some of your classes immutable (most obviously Marks and ExtraActivities)