Question

I want to develop a library for communicating with a circuit via serial port. This circuit understands roughly 100 serial commands and returns a response string.

The commands are divided into 3 categories (settings, environment, and outputs) so I would like to use properties or some other means to nest the categories and methods within the overall class. Instead of throwing all the command methods under a single class, what would be the recommended way to nest them? I want to avoid the following at all costs, it would just be a mess:

public class CircuitLib
{
   ...
   // Methods.
   public string SettingCommand1(string command) {...}
   ...
   public string SettingCommand30(string command) {...}

   public string EnvironmentCommand1(string command) {...}
   ...
   public string EnvironmentCommand30(string command) {...}

   public string OutputCommand1(string command) {...}
   ...
   public string OutputCommand30(string command) {...}
}

It would be nice to be able to use properties to get to the specified category:

circuitLibInstance.GetSettingsProperty.OneOfTheSettingsMethods(stringCommand);

Any guidance would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks Everyone!

Answer 1

Well you could have:

public class Circuit
{
    // Initialize these in the constructor
    private readonly SettingCommands settings;
    private readonly EnvironmentCommands environment;
    private readonly OutputCommands output;

    public SettingCommands Settings { get { return settings; } }
    public EnvironmentCommands Environment { get { return environment; } }
    public OutputCommands Output { get { return output; } }
}

public class SettingCommands
{
    public string Foo(string command) { ... }
}

Then:

string result = instance.Settings.Foo("hello");

Is that what you were after?

Of course if all your command methods actually have the same structure, you might potentially want an enum, for example:

public enum SettingCommand { Foo, Bar, Baz }
public enum EnvironmentCommand { Alice, Bob, Charlie }
public enum OutputCommand { Ender, Bean, Alai }

then:

public class Circuit
{
    public string Execute(SettingCommand command, string data) { ... }
    public string Execute(EnvironmentCommand command, string data) { ... }
    public string Execute(OutputCommand command, string data) { ... }
}

and use as:

string result = instance.Execute(SettingCommand.Foo, "data");