Question

I have a class that has an internal list of other objects like so:

public class Parent
{
    List<Child> _children;
}

where Child say looks like this:

public class Child
{
    public string Name;
}

What I want to do is set up parent where the members of _children can be accessed like so:

...
Child kid = parentInstance["Billy"]; // would find a Child instance 
                                     // whose name value is Billy
...

Is this possible? I could obviously do something like this:

Child kid = parentInstance.GetChild("Billy");

But I prefer the array/dictionary like syntax. This isn’t a big deal if it isn’t, and I don’t want to have to jump through a million hoops for what amounts to syntactic sugar.

Answer 1

You could define an indexed property to the Parent class:

public class Parent
{
    List<Child> _children;

    public Child this[string name] 
    {
        get
        {
            return (_children ?? Enumerable.Empty<Child>())
                .Where(c => c.Name == name)
                .FirstOrDefault();
        }
    }
}