Question

I have a base class, Sport, that has a property will return the proper type of object it should be for a given derived type (for example, Billiards extends Sport, and the property would return the BilliardBall type).

Is there a better way to do this than having a large if statement in the Sport class (if this object is a Billiards instance then return BilliardBall, else if…)?

Answer 1

Why are you talking generics here? And why is Sport knowing about all the sports there are?

You can do something like below, for starters:

public interface IBall
{
}
public class BilliardBall : IBall
{
}
public abstract class Sport
{
    protected abstract IBall Ball { get; }

}
public class Billiards : Sport
{
    protected override IBall Ball
    {
        get { return new BilliardBall(); }
    }
}