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Making a generic property

I’m not quite sure how to do that, but what I would like to do is to create a special type of property that will perform specific tasks at the get and set, and will be defined on generic type.
For example, when writing this:

MyProp<String> name;

a pre-defined get and set will be performed on the string value.

How can that be done?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can make a generic class like this:

public class MyProp<T>
{
    private T _value;

    public T Value
    {
        get
        {
            // insert desired logic here
            return _value;
        }
        set
        {
            // insert desired logic here
            _value = value;
        }
    }

    public static implicit operator T(MyProp<T> value)
    {
        return value.Value;
    }

    public static implicit operator MyProp<T>(T value)
    {
        return new MyProp<T> { Value = value };
    }
}

…then use it in a class like so:

class SomeClass
{
    public MyProp<int> SomeProperty { get; set; }
}

The implicit operators means that you do not need to explicitly set or get the Value property of MyProp, but can write code to access the value in a more “natural” way:

SomeClass instance = new SomeClass();
instance.SomeProperty = 32;
int someInt = instance.SomeProperty;