Question

I have a class which needs some functionality to be encapsulated in some way.

I was thinking of a nested class, and put that functionality plus some states into it.
The relation between these two classes is one-to-one.

The problem it for accessing the outer class member variables or methods they should be declared static and I don’t want it. Another solution is passing a reference of the outer class to inner class.

What’s the best practice for my problem ?

Answer 1

using System;

class OuterType
{
    private static OuterType _instance;

    public OuterType()
    {
        _instance = this;
    }

    private String Message
    {
        get { return "Hello from OuterType"; }
    }

    public void testInnerType()
    {
        InnerType innerType = new InnerType();
        Console.WriteLine(innerType.FormattedOutertMessage);
    }

    private class InnerType
    {
        private readonly OuterType _outerType = _instance;

        public String FormattedOutertMessage
        {
            get { return _outerType.Message.ToUpper(); }
        }
        // InnerType doesn't need to dispose any object of OuterType.
    }
}

Then it works like this:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        OuterType outerType = new OuterType();
        outerType.testInnerType();
        Console.ReadKey();
    }
}

But I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not ?!