Question

Maybe I am overlooking something obvious, but I have seen in code where you may have a property like “HairColor”, and then a method like “HairColor.Update()”. Is this possible?

Person person = new Person(int personID);
person.HairColor = "Blonde";
person.HairColor.Update();

I have specific properties that I want to be able to extend on a case by case basis. I guess I could have a method called “HairColorUpdate”, but seems that HairColor.Update() should be possible. I don’t want to use “set” because I don’t always want to update the DB this way.

The reason I am doing this is because I may only want to call the database to update one column instead of calling my save method which updates every column hopefully improving efficiency.

Answer 1

person.HairColor.Update() just means that the type returned by the HairColor property has a method called Update. In your example it looks like HairColor is a string, so to achieve that you need to implement an extension method for string. E.g. something like

static class StringExtension
{
    public static void Update(this string s)
    {
        // whatever
    }
}

However, I don’t see the point of doing this. The Update method is a static method that works on the string, so it doesn’t affect the Person instance. (even if string did have an Update method it would be unrelated to the Person type).

I believe you would want to have the Update method on Person instead as others have pointed out.