Question

The caption is confusing. Let me clarify a bit:

I’d like to provide events that depend on a parameter so an observer can decide to receive events if something happens to a specific “id”. It could look like this:

public event EventHandler Foo (string id);

I’m aware that this syntax is wrong in .NET 3.5, and I’m also aware that this idea introduces additional problem (for instance, how do we manage unsubscription?).

How should I circumvent this issue? I thought about using something like:

public EventHandler Foo (string id);

which is at least legal syntax and could work, but it still does not look very great to me.

Edit: I’m not asking about passing arguments to the callback function. My idea is more like this:

class Bleh
{
    public event EventHandler Foo (string index);

    private void RaiseEvents() // this is called by a timer or whatever
    {
        Foo["asdf"] (this, EventArgs.Empty); // raises event for all subscribers of Foo with a parameter of "asdf"
        Foo["97"] (this, EventArgs.Empty); // same for all "97"-subscribers
        // above syntax is pure fiction, obviously
    }
}

// subscribe for asdf events via:
Bleh x = new Bleh ();
x.Foo["asdf"] += (s, e) => {};

Explanation
Since you’re probably wondering why I try to do this, I’ll explain my situation. I’ve got a class that provides positions of certain objects (each of these identified by some ID string).

Instead of providing an event EventHandler<PositionChangedEventArgs> that is raised for ANY positional changes, I’d like to have an event for every object (accessed by an index), so observers can listen to the events for a specific ID only.

Answer 1

You could do something like this:

public class Foo
{
    public class Bar
    {
        public event EventHandler PositionChanged;

        internal void RaisePositionChanged()
        {
            var handler = PositionChanged;
            if (handler != null)
                handler(this, EventArgs.Empty);
        }
    }

    private Dictionary<string, Bar> m_objects;

    public Bar this[string id]
    {
        get
        {
            if (!m_objects.ContainsKey(id))
                m_objects.Add(id, new Bar());

            return m_objects[id];
        }
    }

    private void RaisePositionChanged(string id)
    {
        Bar bar;
        if (m_objects.TryGetValue(id, out bar))
            bar.RaisePositionChanged();
    }
}

Then to subscribe an event, it would be as simple as this:

Foo foo = new Foo();

foo["anId"].PositionChanged += YourHandler;