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What collection interface is preferred for the system? By system I mean Repositories, Services, etc. So I need to choose IEnumerable, ICollection, IList or may be even List.
I guess theoretically it would be better to use IEnumerable. But it is less convenient to use: for example, I have to use GetElementAt method instead of indexer.
My current choice is IList but I doubt about this decision.
It really comes down to what type of access you want to allow for consumers of your Repositories, Services, etc.
If you only intend consumers to read through the collection, use
IEnumerable<T>(no write-type methods are available).If you’d like consumers to add directly to the collection, then the methods in
ICollection<T>will give them that.In general, I try to expose collections as
IEnumerable<T>as often as I can. When users want to add something to the collection, they have to call a separate method rather than directly writing to the collection itself. It gives you a chance to validate the input, perform other checks, etc.