Question

I don’t know how to explain this exactly, but I’ll have a go anyway.

I’ve got a base User Control that requires a generic type to be passed through.

public abstract class BaseControl<T> : UserControl where T : BaseClass, new()
{

}

The purpose of the Base Control is to edit properties of children of BaseClass.

Then I have a couple of controls similar to the following

public partial class MyControl : BaseControl<MyClass>
{
}

“MyClass” is inheriting BaseClass.

So lets say I have MyControl and others similar to it used in a page.
Can I do something like the following to get all controls that are inheriting from BaseClass?

foreach(BaseControl<T> c in this.Controls)
{
    //do stuff
}

Answer 1

Not terribly easily. It would be simpler if you had a non-generic BaseControl which BaseControl<T> inherited from:

public abstract class BaseControl : UserControl {}

public abstract class BaseControl<T> : BaseControl where T : BaseClass, new()

then

foreach(BaseControl c in this.Controls.OfType<BaseControl>())
{
    //do stuff
}

You could put any members which didn’t depend on T in the non-generic class, too.

Aside from that, you could examine each control’s type hierarchy and see whether any of them use either the generic or non-generic form of BaseControl<T>, but it would be somewhat messier than this.