Question

I’m sure this must be a common problem. I’ve got a class that in an ideal world would have the following constructors

public Thing(string connectionString)  public Thing(string fileName) 

Obviously this isn’t allowed because the signatures are the same. Does anybody know of an elegant solution to this problem?

Answer 1

You can used the named constructor idiom:

public class Thing {     private string connectionString;      private string filename;      private Thing()     {         /* Make this private to clear things up */     }      public static Thing WithConnection(string connectionString)     {         var thing = new Thing();         thing.connectionString = connectionString;         return thing;     }      public static Thing WithFilename(string filename)     {         var thing = new Thing();         thing.filename = filename;         return thing;     } }