Question

I have a parent control (main form) and a child control (user control). The child control has some code, which determines what functions the application can perform (e.g. save files, write logs etc.). I need to show/hide, enable/disable main menu items of the main form according to the functionality. As I can’t just write MainMenu.MenuItem1.Visible = false; (the main menu is not visible from the child control), I fire an event in the child control and handle this event on the main form. The problem is I need to pass what elements of the menu need to be shown/hidden. To do this I created an enum, showing what to do with the item

public enum ItemMode
{
    TRUE, FALSE, NONE
}

Then I created my eventargs which have 6 parameters of type ItemMode (there are 6 menu items I need to manage). So any time I need to show the 1st item, hide the 2nd and do nothing with the rest I have to write something like this

e = new ItemModeEventArgs(ItemMode.TRUE, ItemMode.FALSE, ItemMode.NONE, ItemMode.NONE, ItemMode.NONE, ItemMode.NONE);
FireMyEvent(e);

This seems like too much code to me and what’s more, what if I need to manage 10 items in future? Then I will have to rewrite all the constructors just to add 4 more NONEs.

I believe there’s a better way of doing this, but I just can’t figure out what it is.

Answer 1

you could create an EventArgs which takes an ItemMode[] or a List<ItemMode> or a Dictionary<string, ItemMode> for those items (instead of the current 6 arguments) – that way you don’t need to change much when adding more items…