Question

Using C#, I need to do some extra work if function A() was called right before function C(). If any other function was called in between A() and C() then I don’t want to do that extra work. Any ideas that would require the least amount of code duplication?

I’m trying to avoid adding lines like flag = false; into every function B1..BN.

Here is a very basic example:

bool flag = false;

void A()
{
    flag = true;
}

void B1()
{
    ...
}

void B2()
{
    ...
}

void C()
{
    if (flag) 
    {
        //do something
    }
}

The above example was just using a simple case but I’m open to using something other than booleans. The important thing is that I want to be able to set and reset a flag of sorts so that C() knows how to behave accordingly.

Thank you for your help. If you require clarification I will edit my post.

Answer 1

I solved a problem with a similar situation (i.e., the need to know whether A was called directly before C) by having a simply state machine in place. Essentially, I built a state object using an enum and a property to manage/query the state.

When my equivalent of A() was called, it would have the business logic piece store off the state indicating that A was called. If other methods (your B’s ) were called, it would toggle the state to one of a few other states (my situation was a bit more complicated) and then when C() was called, the business logic piece was queried to determine if we were going to call some method D() that held the “only if A was just called” functionality.

I suspect there are multiple ways to solve this problem, but I liked the state machine approach I took because it allowed me to expand what was initially a binary situation to handle a more complicated multi-state situation.

I was fortunate that multi-threading was not an issue in my case because that tends to make things more entertaining, but the state machine would likely work in that scenario as well.

Just my two cents.