Question

This is a noob question, I apologize. I have been trying for a while to figure out how to add an object to this array. I have an Employee class, and a Salary class that inherits from Emp, and an Hourly class that does. I created an array like this,

        public Employee[] _Employees;
        ...    
        Employee[] _Employees = new Employee[]{ 
        new Hourly("1000", "Harry","Potter", "L.", "Privet Drive", "201-9090", "40.00", "12.00"),
        new Salary("2201", "A.", "A.", "Dumbledore", "Hogewarts", "803-1230", "1200"),
        new Hourly("3330", "R.","Weasley", "R.", "The Burrow", "892-2000", "40", "10.00"),
        new Salary("4040", "R.", "R.", "Hagrid", "Hogwarts", "910-8765", "1000")
                                                    };

And now I want to add objects to the array that I have read in from a text file. I am doing it like this right now;

                      if(rstring == "H")
                {
                    string fullName = data.ReadLine();
                    string empNum = data.ReadLine();
                    string address = data.ReadLine();
                    string phoneNum = data.ReadLine();
                    string hrWorked = data.ReadLine();
                    string hrRate = data.ReadLine();

                    string[] splitName = fullName.Split(new Char[] { ' ' });

                    string fName = splitName[0];
                    string mName = splitName[1];
                    string lName = splitName[2];

                     _MyForm._Employees = new Employee[] {new Hourly ( empNum, fName, mName, lName, address, phoneNum, hrWorked, hrRate ) };

which doesn’t give me any error, but when I look at what is stored in the _Employees class, it just has the info from above and nothing else. Let me know if I need to explain myself better. Just let me know if I need to go about it another way, or what I need to do to add the read info to this _Employees class.

Answer 1

Instead of having an array, you should consider using a List<Employee>. This will let you add any number of elements to the list, without recreating it yourself:

private List<Employee> employees = new List<Employee>();
public IList<Employee> Employees { get { return this.employees; } }

// ...
this.employees.Add(new Hourly("1000", "Harry","Potter", "L.", "Privet Drive", "201-9090", "40.00", "12.00"));
// .. Add all

Then, when you want to add a new one, you can use:

_MyForm.Employees.Add(new Hourly ( empNum, fName, mName, lName, address, phoneNum, hrWorked, hrRate));