Question

I’m not sure if this is possible or not, but what I would like to be able to do is to have all Children of a Parent base class to run a method defined in the base class without explicitly invoking it in the child class.

In other words, what I’d like to achieve is something like this:

public class Parent
{
    public Parent()
    {
       InitializeComponent();
       Setup(); // not run here if this instance is a child of parent
    }

    protected void Setup()
    {
        // code that depends on InitializeComponent being called in
        // both the parent and any Child's classes 
    }
}

public class Child : Parent
{
    public Child()
    {
       InitializeComponent();
       //Setup(); is invoked here, without having to explicitly 
       // invoke in all children of Parent
    }
}

Is there a pattern that could enable this behaviour, or could perhaps Aspect Oriented Programming be a way to achieve this?

Answer 1

You could instead override the Form.OnLoad method of the parent form; it’s guaranteed to be called just before the Form is shown.

protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e)
{
    Setup();

    base.OnLoad(e);
}