Small design question here. I’m trying to develop a calculation app in C#. I have a class, let’s call it InputRecord, which holds 100s of fields (multi dimensional arrays) This InputRecordclass will be used in a number of CalculationEngines. Each CalculcationEngine can make changes to a number of fields in the InputRecord. These changes are steps needed for it’s calculation.
Now I don’t want the local changes made to the InputRecord to be used in other CalculcationEngine’s classes.
The first solution that comes to mind is using a struct: these are value types. However I’d like to use inheritance: each CalculationEngine needs a few fields only relevant to that engine: it’s has it’s own InputRecord, based on BaseInputRecord.
Can anyone point me to a design that will help me accomplish this?
If you really have a lot of data, using structs or common cloning techniques may not be very space-efficient (e.g. it would use much memory).
Sounds like a design where you need to have a “master store” and a “diff store”, just analogous to a RDBMS you have data files and transactions.
Basically, you need to keep a list of the changes performed per calculation engine, and use the master values for items which aren’t affected by any changes.