Dealing with multiple generics in a method call

Posted by thaBadDawg on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by thaBadDawg
Published on 2010-05-24T22:37:24Z Indexed on 2010/05/24 22:41 UTC
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I've been dealing a lot lately with abstract classes that use generics. This is all good and fine because I get a lot of utility out of these classes but now it's making for some rather ugly code down the line. For example:

abstract class ClassBase<T>
{
    T Property { get; set; }
}

class MyClass : ClassBase<string>
{
    OtherClass PropertyDetail { get; set; }
}

This implementation isn't all that crazy, except when I want to reference the abstract class from a helper class and then I have to make a list of generics just to make reference to the implemented class, like this below.

class Helper
{
    void HelpMe<C, T>(object Value)
        where C : ClassBase<T>, new()
    {
        DoWork();
    }
}

This is just a tame example, because I have some method calls where the list of where clauses end up being 5 or 6 lines long to handle all of the generic data. What I'd really like to do is

class Helper
{
    void HelpMe<C>(object Value)
        where C : ClassBase, new()
    {
        DoWork();
    }
}

but it obviously won't compile. I want to reference ClassBase without having to pass it a whole array of generic classes to get the function to work, but I don't want to reference the higher level classes because there are a dozen of those. Am I the victim of my own cleverness or is there an avenue that I haven't considered yet?

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