Most efficient overriding technique

jcsdeveloper · December 7th, 2005, 03:57 PM

If there is an abstract class that has a virtual method called, for simplicity sake, submit(). It has no parameters at all. But, we need the derived class to implement the functionality (obviously). The derived class needs to take a parameter called orderVO. We have another derived class that takes a parameter of companyVO.

public abstract class parent{

    public virtual void submit(){}
}

public class order : parent{

    public override void submit(orderVO vo){

    //implementation
}

public class company : parent {

    public override void submit(companyVO){
    //implementation
}

Basically, the whole purpose of the parent class is to define the contract that these objects must follow. With its lack of implementation is could also be an interface. I'm trying to write as little conditional/jump through code as possible and this is probably a trivial question.

Thanks in advance,
Jason

jacob · December 7th, 2005, 04:01 PM

I see no question, but if the question is if you can use an interface instead, I would say yes. And I might add that your child classes would then have to implement the method always, and not as using the abstract approach.

However, the benefit of an interface is also that you can type the object you are using more abstractly (e.g. IMyInterface), and then know the methods which is always implemented, but when you use different signatures for the methods, this will not be a solution.

I think, that if I were you I would make a more abstract argument to the submit method, e.g. a Hashtable. Then if the Submit method do not need arguments you can just set it to null. Another approach would be to pass the nessesary arguments to global variables before calling the argument-less Submit method.

Jacob.

jcsdeveloper · December 7th, 2005, 04:06 PM

I would also like to add that I don't want to create an interface type for the 2 vo classes to implement and then just use that in all three of the method declarations above:

parent
    submit(vo)
order : parent
    submit(vo)
company : parent
    submit(vo)

I'm also seking the most efficient way.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again,
Jason

jcsdeveloper · December 7th, 2005, 04:10 PM

I'm sorry. Visual Studio is telling me I cannot override because my derived classes do not have identical declarations as the parent class. There is no parameter in the parent class but I want them in the derived classes. The method names on the other hand are the same.

So my question is what is the best way to mimic this behavior without writing too much conditional code and/or ctyping?

Thanks,
Jason

jacob · December 7th, 2005, 04:18 PM

Well, in code I would probably do something like this ...

Code:

public abstract class Parent
{
    public virtual void Submit(Hashtable properties)
    {
        throw new Exception("Submit not implemented.");
    }
}

public class Child : Parent
{
    public override void Submit(Hashtable properties)
    {
        // Implementation.
    }
}

But the developer who should develop the child class are not forced to implement the Submit method. Therefore, you should/could do it the interface way if that is your approach, or I guess simply make the method abstract.

Hope it helps, Jacob.