CODEWITHSUNDEEP
.net-4.5
user246252
user246252

Reputation:

In which scenario we need a ReadOnlyCollection?

Dotnet 4.5 has introduce ReadOnlyCollection. My question is what is the practical useage of it? What scenarios we may need this kind of data structure?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 97

Answers (3)

Loek Bergman
Loek Bergman

Reputation: 2195

This class is useful in a multithreading application. In a multithreading environment can it be a real problem to have a collection of objects, which might be changed by some other thread. This assures threadsafety and lessens the complexity of the code.

Upvotes: 0

Michael Stum
Michael Stum

Reputation: 180944

When you want to return a collection that the caller should not be able to modify, but you still want to have the guarantees that an IList gives over an IEnumerable, e.g. a free .Count property, an indexer and the ability to safely iterate over it multiple times, both which aren't guaranteed on an IEnumerable.

Upvotes: 1

Sergey Kalinichenko
Sergey Kalinichenko

Reputation: 726599

You need read-only collections when your API returns collection objects to your callers, copying is too expensive, and you would prefer to stay away from returning IEnumerable<T>. This is commonly desirable in situations when random access is required over the returned collection.

Upvotes: 1

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