Question

I am sure I am not going to use the correct words to explain but I hope you understand what I am trying to accomplish.
I have a class that gets passed in dictionary collection. Is it mandatory that this passed in dictionary collection has certain keys that this class needs. I would like to be able to expose publicly those keys needed by the class, but not just as strings, but actual items. An enumeration would work but since this class is a base class I dont think that is a good solution. I need something similar to the Resources class that is generated everytime you add items to the Resources.resx file. So you that you can just go to Resources.Resources.MyLabel1, Resources.Resources.MyLabel2, etc.
Is this possible?

Thanks,
Mike

Answer 1

You could just offer a static or const member on your class:

class PickyClass {
  public static readonly string[] RequiredKeys = new[] {"length", "width"};

  /// <summary>
  /// Please note that you must include at least RequiredKeys in values
  /// </summary>
  public void Setup(Dictionary<string,string> values)
  {
    ...
  }
}

(edit) or is it important that they are addressable by name? In which case, how about:

class PickyClass {
  public class RequiredKeys
  {
    public const string Length = "length";
    public const string Width = "width";
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Please note that you must include every const in RequiredKeys in values
  /// </summary>
  public void Setup(Dictionary<string,string> values)
  {
    ...
  }
}