Question

I’m attempting to set a private field of an array of ints from outside the class through a public property accessor. I’m almost certain the problem is my lack of knowledge of the syntax to get this done. I’ve figured out how to set individual values if I specify the index for the array when accessing the property through the object. Here is what I have so far.

My class below.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace paramRefVal
{
    class ParamaterTest
    {
        private int[] _ints = new int[5];
        private int _i;

        public int[] Ints
        {
            get { return _ints; }
            set { _ints = value; }
        }

        public int I
        {
            get { return _i; }
            set { _i = value; }
        }

        public void SomeFunction(int[] Ints, int I)
        {
            Ints[0] = 100;
            I = 100;
        }
    }
}

This is my main method

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace paramRefVal
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            ParamaterTest paramTest = new ParamaterTest();
            paramTest.I = 0;
            paramTest.Ints[0] = 99;
            Console.WriteLine("Ints[0] = {0}", paramTest.Ints[0]);
            Console.WriteLine("I = {0}", paramTest.I);
            Console.WriteLine("Calling SomeFunction...");
            paramTest.SomeFunction(paramTest.Ints, paramTest.I);
            Console.WriteLine("Ints[0] = {0}", paramTest.Ints[0]);
            Console.WriteLine("I = {0}", paramTest.I);
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

The line I’m interested in is

paramTest.Ints[0] = 99;

I’ve attempted to set multiple values like so to no avail.

paramTest.Ints[] = { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 };

I’m getting two compilation errors. “The type or namespace name ‘paramTest’ could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)” without the quotes.

And secondly. “Identifier expected” without the quotes.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

You can use:

paramTest.Ints = new int[] { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 };

Which can be simplified to:

paramTest.Ints = new[] { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 };

If you want to use the array initializer, you can do it this way:

int[] ints = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4};
paramTest.Ints = ints;

I don’t get any compilation error about the type, though. Could you be more specific?