Question

When I want to extend an existing Object I create my own and use inherits clause, and works fantastic… problem is when I want to use this new Object instead of the original, the populate part is a “pain”.

is there any AUTO POPULATE way of doing this?

Original Object: Customer
My Object: CustomerWithGroup

public class CustomerWithGroup : Customer
{
    public CustomerWithGroup() { }
    public string GroupName { get; set; }
    public string Fullname
    {
        get
        {
            return string.Format("{0} {1} {2}", firstname, middlename, lastname).Replace("  ", " ");
        }
    }
}

and I’m populating it like this:

customerswithgroup = new List<CustomerWithGroup>();
string groupname;
foreach (Customer c in customers)
{
    groupname = customergroup.Find(x => x.customer_group_id == c.group_id).customer_group_code;

    customerswithgroups.Add(
        new CustomerWithGroup { 
            GroupName = groupname,
            created_at = c.created_at, customer_id = c.customer_id, default_billing = c.default_billing, default_shipping = c.default_shipping, email = c.email, firstname = c.firstname, group_id = c.group_id, increment_id = c.increment_id, lastname = c.lastname, middlename = c.middlename, password_hash = c.password_hash, prefix = c.prefix, store_id = c.store_id, suffix = c.suffix, taxvat = c.taxvat, updated_at = c.updated_at, website_id = c.website_id });
}

It’s a bunch of code! and you can imagine doing this for really big objects!

Ins’t there a way of telling, like

Hei object, please load all the base members from this Object!

newCG = new CustomerWithGroup().LoadFromBase(c);
newCG.groupName = "my group";
customerswithgroup.Add( newCG );

Is there any trick we can use?

Answer 1

No, there is no easy way. You could use reflection and write a bunch of code to do that, but it would be a lot of work.

In my opinion you should rethink your design. Inheritance is not a good solution in this case, composition here is better, like so:

public class CustomerWithGroups
{
    public CustomerWithGroups(Customer c) { Customer = c; }

    public Customer Customer { get; private set; }

    public string GroupName { get; set; }
    public string Fullname
    {
        get
        {
            return string.Format("{0} {1} {2}", Customer.firstname, Customer.middlename, Customer.lastname).Replace("  ", " ");
        }
    }
}