Best loose way to get objects with common base class
- by Michael Teper
I struggled to come up with a good title for this question, so suggestions are welcome.
Let's say we have an abstract base class ActionBase that looks something like this:
public abstract class ActionBase
{
public abstract string Name { get; }
public abstract string Description { get; }
// rest of declaration follows
}
And we have a bunch of different actions defined, like a MoveFileAction, WriteToRegistryAction, etc. These actions get attached to Worker objects:
public class Worker
{
private IList<ActionBase> _actions = new List<ActionBase>();
public IList<ActionBase> Actions { get { return _actions; } }
// worker stuff ...
}
So far, pretty straight-forward. Now, I'd like to have a UI for setting up Workers, assigning Actions, setting properties, and so on. In this UI, I want to present a list of all available actions, along with their properties, and for that I'd want to first gather up all the names and descriptions of available actions (plus the type) into a collection of the following type of item:
public class ActionDescriptor
{
public string Name { get; }
public string Description { get; }
poblic Type Type { get; }
}
Certainly, I can use reflection to do this, but is there a better way? Having Name and Description be instance properties of ActionBase (as opposed to statics on derived classes) smells a bit, but there isn't an abstract static in C#.
Thank you!
