Question

I have a list with a lot of objects List<MyObjects> – Im iterating through this list and reading the objects. Thats all fine. I just relized now, what it would be awesome if I could add 1 more special value to this List – not an Object, just 1 value of something (a string).

I could now create a class like

class Needless
{
  public List<MyObjects> MyList { get; set; }
  public string MyValue { get; set; }
}

but Im trying to avoid that. I just really need 1 string with an input every List<MyObjects> Any ideas?

Answer 1

Tuple<string, List<MyObject>> is an option. However, if you are going to use this pairing a lot, I would advise creating a custom class for it to be more explicit – either like you have done, or by deriving List<MyObject> and adding the string as a property.

If you are working “in scope” you could always make anonymous types:

var t = new { TheString = "", TheList = new List<MyObject>() };
var list = t.TheList;
var s = t.TheString;

But this only really has benefit in the scope of a method. The compiler can give IntelliSense for this and it is strongly-typed at compile time.

Or if you really want to go all out, use ExpandoObject from System.Dynamic:

var expando = new ExpandoObject();
expando.List = new List<MyObject>();
expando.TheString = "";

This is typed in-line without any IntelliSense support, and will invoke the DLR. ExpandoObject simply uses an IDictionary<string, object> under the hood, so…

var dict = (IDictionary<string, object>)expando;

…is valid.

The last option is a little tongue-in-cheek. It’ll work, but the development experience against it isn’t ideal compared to other options. That said, we use ExpandoObject in our test code, but I can’t remember why. One can only hope the reasoning was sound, but it was likely a developer getting giddy with new toys…