CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#
WadeJohnston
WadeJohnston

Reputation: 13

cloning to set this object's properties through the constructor

I have the following problem. I want to be able to set this to the passed reference without using reflection, can this be done? 

//partial class of a Linq-to-SQL class 
public partial class Product
{
   public Product (Product product, List<ProductAttributes> productAttributes)
   {
      // without individually setting all the properties

      //then just set any other properties
      this.ProductAttributes = productAttributes;
   }
}

Upvotes: 1

Views: 104

Answers (4)

Adam Robinson
Adam Robinson

Reputation: 185703

You cannot set this in reference types (and setting it in value types is probably not something to be condoned). If what you're looking to do is a shallow (or deep) copy of the object's fields or properties, then you have two choices:

  1. Manually
  2. Reflection

Neither the language nor the runtime have any built-in facility for automating shallow or deep copying, and for good reason. It would be impossible to determine what that would look like for any given type.

Upvotes: 1

ken2k
ken2k

Reputation: 49013

You can't assign anything to this in a class as it's read-only.

I suspect you wanted to do so because of a bad design. You probably should post what you actually want, not how you would like to do it so we can provide a more appropriate answer.

Upvotes: 2

Jon
Jon

Reputation: 437824

Sorry, but this is not possible to do magically. You either need to use reflection, or to write a method that manually does the copying. There are, of course, multiple libraries that can do this for you.

Upvotes: 0

Jon Skeet
Jon Skeet

Reputation: 1503629

You can't, basically.

You can only set this in structs, and even then it's usually a bad idea :)

If you can explain what higher-level goal you're trying to achieve, we may be able to help more - but you simply can't change the value of this for a reference type, with or without reflection.

Upvotes: 3

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