Question

I have alluded to this issue in my other question, but i think it’s worthwhile breaking it out into its own question, as it’s not really dependant on the other scenarios i mentioned.

Anyways – onto the Q, don’t know if this is possible. Looking for a solution/workaround.

I have a Class Library, with nothing but POCO’s:

MyCompany.MyProject.Domain.POCO

This assembly has a POCO like this:

public class Post
{
   public int PostId { get; set; }
   public int Name { get; set; }
      ...
}

Now, i have another Class Library, which is my DAL/Repository, and uses Entity Framework 4.0 for the persistence:

MyCompany.MyProject.Repositories

This assembly has a reference to the POCO project, as it needs to be perform CRUD operations on the POCO’s (grab DB objects, project into POCO’s, return, as well as modify POCO’s).

Now, i also have a Web Application, which has a reference to both the POCO and Repository assembly.

If i do this:

somePOCO.PostId = 10;

I get a SQLException, as PostId is an IDENTITY field in the database, and hence should not be explicity set.

Is there a way i can hide the setter for these special properties, so that only the repository has access to the setter?

I can’t think of a way to do it with regular accessibility modifiers (as none of them suit the scenario), can you guys think of a workaround?

Answer 1

you could make the setter internal, and make the internals visible to the repository assembly

[assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("MyLibrary.Repositories")]
public class Post
{
   public int PostId { get; internal set; }
   public int Name { get; internal set; }
      ...
}

This means that everything can ‘get’ those properties, but only this assembly, and the assembly containing the repository, can ‘set’