Question

I have WinForm which is a tab based and including all Tabs it has around 60 UI Components. Depending upon value selected in some UI Components i am Auto filling rest of the UI components.For this i would like to write a helper class.But the problem is if i pass Winform object to that class i am not able to access values on that Form because all the member are declared private.

one possible solution is that I can write around 60 properties in the Winform but i think this is not the best way to do it. I would like to know what is the best way to handle problem like these ?

Answer 1

You could change the Modifiers for your UI components from private to internal. This would allow all classes within the same project to directly access the components.

However, I would argue that exposing the necessary components through properties is a better design than exposing them publically/internally. I acknowledge that it includes a fair amount of typing, but it’s safer as you can expose them cleanly, in a manner specific to your use case.

That being said – there are a couple of things I would consider:

1. Can this be refactored into a smaller class, using fewer components by using UserControls? This might make it more managable, as well as promote reuse. 60 UI elements is a fair amount for a single screen.
2. Can you refactor this to pass the data, instead of trying to work with the controls directly? For example, you could auto-fill the data via a shared interface, and data bind the controls to the data, or something similar.