Question

Say I have 3 tables in my database: people, tasks and projects

Say I have 3 classes for repository’s: PeopleRepository, TaskRepository and ProjectRepository.

Now I want a single method, that will work with any of these classes.

Obviously I could just write out loads of code for each table, but I’d rather keep code down to a minimum. I already have reflection working fine for the different column names that might be passed to the method, but I can’t seem to get code like this to work.

switch (tableName)
            {

                case "people":
                    var repository = new PeopleRepository();
                    break;
                case "tasks":
                    var repository = new TaskRepository();
                    break;
                case "projects":
                    var repository = new ProjectRepository();
                    break;
             }

//Modify respective database table
repository.getItem(id); //etc
repository.Save(); //etc

I’ve tried a few other things like this, but none of them seemed to work. Changing the scope of where the variable is defined etc.

I feel like c# should have something nice to deal with this, is this so? Or do I have to write the same code in each switch statement?

Answer 1

You could make an interface that those classes would implement. Then use

IRepository repository;

// your switch here
//switch() { case x: repository = new TypeRepository(); }

repository.GetItem(id);
repository.Save();

You can also make repository dynamic

dynamic repository;

And the type will be resolved in runtime.