Question

I have an interface IDatabase that interfaces a few different ways to access a database. For example using RESTful, or MySqlDirectConnect.

Next I have a class foo that has member variables A, B, C that need to pull there data out of the database.

public class foo
{
    private string a;
    private int b;
    private int c;
}

Originally, I was going to create a Get method for every single member variable. Using Generics, you specify what interface you want to use.

public string GetA<T>() where T: IDatabase
{
   //example might be GetA<RESTful>();
}

public int GetB<T>() where T: IDatabase
{
   //example might be GetB<MySQL>();
}

and so on….

problem I see is that if the database changes I have to go back and change all these methods. In some cases class foo might have around 20 variables with a Get() method for each.

So I would like to create a really generic GetValue() where I can specify both the interface and the variable i would like to query for.

something along the lines of:

public object GetValue<T>(the class variable I want to query) where T: IDatabase
{
    //query database using type T and return it to the variable specified
}

I would like to avoid having a conditional for every member variable inside the method.

So is this possible?

Answer 1

Here is a great solution I worked out

public void GetValue<T>(string property) where T: IDatabase, new()
{
    IDatabase database = new T();
    database.RegisterObserver(this);

    string FROM = typeof(theCurrentClass).Name;
    string SELECT = editProperty = property;
    string WHERE = "1";

    database.Select(new Query(SELECT, FROM, WHERE));        
}

private string fieldName;  //contains the name of the field I want to edit

void IObserver.Update(object data)
{       
    FieldInfo field = this.GetType().GetField(fieldName, BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);

    if(field != null)
    {
        field.SetValue(this, data);         
    }
}

EDIT: I finally figured it out, just updated the above code with the final answer