Question

I want to create a business entity. I want to store additional information with each property

e.g.

    Public Class BE
    {
        private string _fundCity;

        public string FUND_CITY 
        {
            get { return _fundCity; }
            set { _fundCity = value; }
        }
    }

For FUND_CITY i want to store “StartOffSet” and “EndOffSet” values in BE.
Can some one help.

Answer 1

If you want to have properties that are directly related to FUND_CITY then normally you would make it an object in its own right and add the properties to the new object, and you can still store it in your object BE as you are now.

If you want FUND_CITY to remain as a string, then you must add StartOffset and EndOffset as properties on the BE class, just as you have with FUND_CITY. I would give you an example but you haven’t specified what types those two properties are.

EDIT:

It sounds like what you need is a wrapper class with a shot of generics. If you want to track StartOffset and EndOffset for every property on BE, then first create a generic class that will be used for each property in BE:

public class MyProperty<T> 
{
    public MyProperty(T propertyValue)
    {
        PropertyValue = propertyValue;
    }

    public int StartOffset { get; set; }
    public int EndOffset { get; set; }

    public T PropertyValue { get; set; }
}

PropertyValue is used to hold (or wrap) the actual value of the property. Your class BE then changes to look like this:

public class BE
{
    public MyProperty<string> FUND_CITY { get; set; }

    public MyProperty<int> SomeOtherProperty { get; set; }
}

you can then use it like this:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {

        var myBE = new BE();
        myBE.FUND_CITY = new MyProperty<string>("some random string value") { StartOffset = 0, EndOffset = 10 };
        myBE.SomeOtherProperty = new MyProperty<int>(999);

        Console.ReadKey();
    }
}

If you want to go still further and keep a list of these, then you can use the inbuilt generic List<T> type, but then you have a small issue: the List<T> wants all its contents to be of the same type. You can get round this either by using a base class, or by just casting everything in the List<T> to type object. Here is an example of using the base class, it has a small change from the code above:

public class MyPropertyBase
{
    public int StartOffset { get; set; }
    public int EndOffset { get; set; }
}

public class MyProperty<T> : MyPropertyBase
{
    public MyProperty(T propertyValue)
    {
        PropertyValue = propertyValue;
    }

    public T PropertyValue { get; set; }
}

public class BE
{
    public MyProperty<string> FUND_CITY { get; set; }

    public MyProperty<int> SomeOtherProperty { get; set; }

    public List<MyPropertyBase> MyDataPoints { get; set; }
}