Question

In classes whose instances I persist using an object database, I keep having to do this:

private string _name;
public string Name
    {
    get { return this._name; }
    set { _name = value; this.Save(); }
    }

whereas I would much rather type this:

[PersistedProperty(Name)]
private string _name;

where the PersistedProperty attributes generates a Getter and Setter just like the default [Property()] attribute, except I want to add a line of code to the generated Setter.

Is there a way I can create an attribute which does this? Hopefully , which works with Intellisense.

How does the default [Property()] attribute even do it’s stuff? If I saw the code I could graft that…

Note: I am actually doing this in Boo, but thought I’d give c# code as more people might be willing to answer that, however, if there is a Boo specific solution, I’m all ears!

Update:

My aim was simply to reduce typing and clutter. It turns out the simplest way of doing this was with a script which generates partial classes based on markup in my classes.

Auto-generating source code from markup (in tandem with partial classes) is easy, and actually looks like an extremely promising way to get round some of the problems we normally try to solve with inheritance and generic types.

Answer 1

This requires aspect oriented programming. While not directly supported in .NET, it can be done via third party tooling, such as PostSharp.

For intellisense to work, however, this must be done in a library, as the (final) compiled code will be unrolled into the full property getter/setter.