Question

I have an application which uses plugins. After creating several of them I’ve found that a big chunk of code is repeated here and there on them so I want to extract a super “plugin base”.

Previous the refactor I had the following structure:

After the refactor I have the next one:

I currently don’t find a way to model the fact that the plugin engine has a property settings of type plugin settings and the plugin engine base has a property settings of type plugin settings base. I feel that somehow should be a way to declare that the settings property of the plugin engine base should be a “cast” of the settings property of the plugin engine and to model the fact that they both are the same property.

I’m not sure if the problem is explained enough. Feel free to ask for clarifications.

Thanks.

Answer 1

An approach I found:

Base class:

class PluginEngineBase
{
    public PluginSettingsBase Settings { get; set; }
}

Inheritor:

class PluginEngine : PluginEngineBase
{
    public PluginSettings Settings
    {
        get
        {
            return (PluginSettings)base.Settings;
        }
        set
        {
            base.Settings = value;
        }
    }
}