Question

Lets say I inherit a class, that has several public properties and/or methods, however I do not want them to be public properties/methods of my class – in other words, I want to make those properties protected properties of my class.

Can this be achieved?

I hope I was clear enough, if not please let me know, will try to explain myself better.

EDIT:

Right, thank you all for answers however I don’t think I was clear enough. What I am trying to accomplish is this:

I wrote a windows control that extends ListView control. ListView has a public collection Items, that can be modified. That’s all fine, however I wrote new methods for adding items to listview because of the extra data I need.

It all works great so far, however the Items collection can still be modified by anything, which is a problem, because if an item is added by direct manipulation of Items collection not all data I need is gathered, thus causing an error.

Since we hope to reuse this control several times in different projects, we are afraid that sooner or later, the default way of adding items to Items collection will be used (just a matter of time really). We are just looking for a way to prevent that from happening, like throwing an exception when Items collection gets bigger, but the way it was intended.

I hope this all makes sense now.

Answer 1

Never say never. This is probably not the best idea but it seems to work for me. This hides items by re-implementing it in the subclass and then hiding it using attributes. I added in a “CustomExposedItems” property so you can see that the existing items are still accessible in the underlying ListView.

public partial class CustomListView : ListView
{
    public CustomListView()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

    public System.Windows.Forms.ListView.ListViewItemCollection CustomExposedItems
    {
        get
        {
            return base.Items;
        }

    }

    [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)]    
    [Browsable(false)]    
    [DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Hidden)]
    [Obsolete("Use the new custom way of adding items xyz")]
    public new System.Windows.Forms.ListView.ListViewItemCollection Items    
    { 
        get { throw new NotSupportedException(); }    
    }

}