Question

I have a class as follows:

public class Document
{
    public List<DocumentSection> sections = new List<DocumentSection>();
    ...

Various questions cover the situation where a property needs to be writable from inside the class but readonly from outside it (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4662180/c-sharp-public-variable-as-writeable-inside-the-clas-but-readonly-outside-the-cl)

I’d like to do the same but for this collection – allow adding to it from within the class, but only allow a user to iterate through it when they are outside it. Is this elegantly doable?

Thanks

Answer 1

Expose the collection as IEnumerable so that users can only iterate through it.

public class Document {
   private List<DocumentSection> sections;

   public IEnumerable<DocumentSection> Sections 
   { 
       get { return sections; }
   }
}