Question

There are two different UserControls which share some common Properties.
What I’d like to do is to switch between these two based on an external flag.

UserControl u1, u2;

if(flag)
{
    u1 = u1 as ControlType1;
    u2 = u2 as ControlType1;
}
else
{
    u1 = u1 as ControlType2;
    u2 = u2 as ControlType2;
}

SomeMethod(u1.SelectedItemName, u2.SelectedItemName);

Since UserControl doesn’t have a property called “SelectedItemName”, the code would not throw error.

What I’ve currently done is, I’ve added an extension method on UserControl which gets the “SelectedItemName” using reflection, and I get the value by calling u1.SelectedItemName() instead of u1.SelectedItemName;

My question is what is an easy way to fix this without using extension/ maybe the right way. Note that I don’t want to repeat the SomeMethod(a,b) inside the if statement.

Answer 1

My suggestion would be to make both of these UserControl classes implement a shared interface or derive from a shared base class. You could then develop against the base class or interface without worrying about the flags/switches at all.

IYourUserControl u1, u2;

SomeMethod(u1, u2);

This would work provided SomeMethod was defined as:

void SomeMethod(IYourUserControl one, IYourUserControl two) { // ...