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c#inheritanceoverridingabstract-class
George Kerwood
George Kerwood

Reputation: 1306

Is it possible to override the nested class definition of an abstract parent, within an inheriting class?

Context

I have an scenario in which I wish to define several Bar classes, each of which must define Request, Response and Error classes of their own. For this reason, I have written an abstract Foo class, within an intension to force an the implementation.

Request, Response and Error share a base class, PDU, and must implement their respective interfaces. Each Bar requires a sufficiently unique Request, Response and Error, that they must be independently defined.

Furthermore, the Request, Response and Error of each Bar shall not be instantiated outside of that Bar, so it seems correct (at least to me) that the class definitions should be nested.

Question

Is it possible to override a nested class definition within a child, inheriting from an abstract parent? Or at least to achieve the same through another approach?

Illegal Example

Below is an illegal code example of how I would of liked to write it:

public abstract class Foo
{
    public class Request: PDU, IRequest
    { }

    public class Response : PDU, IResponse
    { }

    public class Error : PDU, IException
    { }
}

public class Bar : Foo
{
    public override Request
    {
        // Definition of Request goes here
    }

    public override Response
    {
        // Definition of Response goes here
    }

    public override Error
    {
        // Definition of Error goes here
    }
}

Upvotes: 4

Views: 738

Answers (2)

samiksc
samiksc

Reputation: 175

Since the classes Request, Response and Exception are very specific to each Bar class, it does not look like the case for a 'class'. All you need is the interfaces IRequest, IResponse, IException.

Implement these interfaces in each 'Bar' class and provide class specific implementation for the methods in the interface. This way there is no issue for derived classes, regular inheritance principles will work.

What remains is the question of inheriting from PDU class - Does the PDU class contain any implementation? Or is it an abstract class? If it does not have any implementation, it can be converted into an interface which can be implemented by Bar classes.

If it contains implementation, each Bar class can create an instance of PDU class for use by the methods implementing IRequest/IResponse/IException.

Upvotes: 1

DavidG
DavidG

Reputation: 118937

It isn't possible to override a nested class, so your current approach won't work. However, I think this is what you are trying to achieve.

My advice would be to use interfaces and generics. So let's say you have your 3 interfaces:

public interface IRequest
{
    //snip
}
public interface IResponse
{
    //snip
}

public interface IException
{
    //snip
}

Now you can make your base class look like this:

public abstract class BaseThing<TRequest, TResponse, TError>
    where TRequest : IRequest
    where TResponse : IResponse
    where TError : IException
{
    // An example method
    public abstract TResponse GetThing(TRequest request);
}

Now you can make some concrete definitions of the above things:

public class FooRequest : IRequest
{
    //snip
}

public class FooResponse : IResponse
{
    //snip
}

public class FooError : IException
{
    //snip
}

public class FooThing : BaseThing<FooRequest, FooResponse, FooError>
{
    public override FooResponse GetThing(FooRequest request)
    {
        //snip
    }
}

Upvotes: 4

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