Question

Is there a way to override an existing method in a partial class?

Something like this (I know this doesn’t compile)

/// <summary>
/// Generated Code for MyClass
/// </summary>
public partial class MyClass
{
    public void MyMethod()
    {
        //Do work specific to MyClass
    }
}

/// <summary>
/// Non-generated extension for MyClass
/// </summary>
public partial class MyClass
{
    public override void MyMethod()
    {
        //Do some other work
    }
}

I am running into this need while doing some code generation. I am generating partial classes from my EDMX and methods for these classes where 90% of my classes will have methods specific to their properties.

But I am running into cases where I would like the one-off the methods.

Is there something like this I am overlooking? Or some suggested alternatives?

Answer 1

You can use a partial method for this. I assume you can extrapolate here if you need to make changes to the signature, etc.

It’s also worth noting that if you define a partial method and nobody defines an implementation for it in another partial bit of the class it just turns into a no-op, not an error, so you don’t need to worry about that causing problems. It was literally built for just this use case.

/// <summary>
/// Generated Code for MyClass
/// </summary>
public partial class MyClass
{
    private partial void MyMethodImpl();
    public void MyMethod()
    {
        //Do work specific to MyClass

        MyMethodImpl();
    }
}

/// <summary>
/// Non-generated extension for MyClass
/// </summary>
public partial class MyClass
{
    public void MyMethodImpl()
    {
        //Do some other work
    }
}