Question

In a attempt to put some more oop in a program i am looking to make a private instance variable in one class (object) accesable to a class.

private byte [][] J;

All those code refers to this jagged array with this.
Now in the other class i putted all the for loops along with the consolewritlines to display the wanted results. Basicly it says “the name J does not exist in the current context”
But how exactly do i make this J accesable?

I have tried with get and set but i keep getting ‘cannot convert to byte to byte[][]’

Also what kind of cyntax would i need with get and set?

Something along like this? Or would i need several more steps? :

public Byte JArray
get { return J; }  //can converrt to byte here
set { J = value; } //cannnot convert to byte here

Kind regards

Answer 1

If you want to expose a variable via a property, the type of the property has to be the same as the type of the variable (or compatible):

public byte[][] JArray
{
    get { return J; }
    set { J = value; }
}

However, you probably don’t really need the setter – unless you actually want callers to be able to change J to refer to a different jagged array. Just with a getter they can still change values within the array, but they can’t change the variable itself.

Even with this though, callers could still change the contents of the “outer” array, changing a whole “column” at a time:

foo.JArray[10] = new byte[10];

An alternative is to add an indexer to your class:

public byte this[int x, int y]
{
    get { return J[x][y]; }
    set { J[x][y] = value; }
}

This will only let callers access the actual elements, hiding the fact that it’s backed by an array.

Exposing an array directly is generally a bad idea – indeed, leading minds consider arrays to be somewhat harmful.