Question

Suppose I have two functions which look like this:

public static void myFunction1(int a, int b, int c, string d)
{
    //dostuff
    someoneelsesfunction(c,d);
    //dostuff2
}

public static void myFunction2(int a, int b, int c, Stream d)
{
    //dostuff
    someoneelsesfunction(c,d);
    //dostuff2
}

What would be a good way to avoid repeated dostuff?

Ideas I’ve thought of, but don’t like:

1. I could make d an object and cast at runtype based on type, but this strikes me as not being ideal; it removes a type check which was previously happening at compile time.
2. I could also write a private helper class that takes an object and write both signatures as public functions.
3. I could replace dostuff and dostuff2 with delegates or function calls or something.

Answer 1

I might do something like this:

public static void myFunction1(int a, int b, int c, string d)
{
    //dostuff
    someoneelsesfunction(c, d);
    //dostuff2
}

public static void myFunction2(int a, int b, int c, Stream d)
{
    string str = d.ReadEntireString(); // no such method, but basically
        // whatever you need to do to read the string out of the stream
    myFunction1(a, b, c, str);      
}

… and change the name of both functions to MyFunction (to take advantage of overloading, which is the same thing someoneelsesfunction() is doing.

NOTE: this solution would be impractical if the string contained in the Stream is ginormous. If so, you might want to do this the other way around: read the string d into a stream and call the override with the stream parameter.