Question

I’m trying to make a class where you can access a collection in it and get an item using a string index, (I hope this makes sense), basically I would like to know either what this is called or how to do it?

here is an example of what I mean;

string blah = SomeClass.Items["Item1"].ToString();

Hopefully someone can make some sense of this.

Thank You.

Answer 1

I think you are looking for an indexer.

Indexers allow instances of a class or struct to be indexed just like arrays. Indexers resemble properties except that their accessors take parameters.

In your case you want to index using a string. Something like this:

public MyItem this[string index]
{
    get { return ... }
}

It may be that you would be better off removing the Items layer from your syntax. That would result in your code reading like this:

string blah = SomeClass["Item1"].ToString();