Controlling access to an internal collection in c# - Pattern required

Question

This is kind of hard to explain, I hope my English is sufficient:

I have a class "A" which should maintain a list of objects of class "B" (like a private List). A consumer of class "A" should be able to add items to the list. After the items are added to the list, the consumer should not be able to modify them again, left alone that he should not be able to temper with the list itself (add or remove items). But he should be able to enumerate the items in the list and get their values. Is there a pattern for it? How would you do that?

If the question is not clear enough, please let me know.

Answer 1

To prevent editing the list or its items you have to make them immutable, which means you have to return a new instance of an element on every request.

See Eric Lippert's excellent series of "Immutability in C#": http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/tags/Immutability/C_2300_/default.aspx (you have to scroll down a bit)

Answer 2

Wow, there are some overly complex answers here for a simple problem.

Have a private List<T>

Have an public void AddItem(T item) method - whenever you decide to make that stop working, make it stop working. You could throw an exception or you could just make it fail silently. Depends on what you got going on over there.

Have a public T[] GetItems() method that does return _theList.ToArray()

Answer 3

As many of these answers show, there are many ways to make the collection itself immutable.

It takes more effort to keep the members of the collection immutable. One possibility is to use a facade/proxy (sorry for the lack of brevity):

class B
{
    public B(int data) 
    { 
        this.data = data; 
    }

    public int data
    {
        get { return privateData; }
        set { privateData = value; }
    }

    private int privateData;
}

class ProxyB
{
    public ProxyB(B b)   
    { 
        actual = b; 
    }

    public int data
    {
        get { return actual.data; }
    }

    private B actual;
}

class A : IEnumerable<ProxyB>
{
    private List<B> bList = new List<B>();

    class ProxyEnumerator : IEnumerator<ProxyB>
    {
        private IEnumerator<B> b_enum;

        public ProxyEnumerator(IEnumerator<B> benum)
        {
            b_enum = benum;
        }

        public bool MoveNext()
        {
            return b_enum.MoveNext();
        }

        public ProxyB Current
        {
            get { return new ProxyB(b_enum.Current); }
        }

        Object IEnumerator.Current
        {
            get { return this.Current; }
        }

        public void Reset()
        {
            b_enum.Reset();
        }

        public void Dispose()
        {
            b_enum.Dispose();
        }
    }

    public void AddB(B b) { bList.Add(b); }

    public IEnumerator<ProxyB> GetEnumerator()
    {
        return new ProxyEnumerator(bList.GetEnumerator());
    }

    IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator()
    {
        return this.GetEnumerator();
    }
}

The downside of this solution is that the caller will be iterating over a collection of ProxyB objects, rather than the B objects they added.

Answer 4

EDIT: Added support for edition contexts. Caller can only add elements inside an edition context. You can aditionally enforce that only one edition context can be created for the lifetime of the instance.

---

Using encapsulation you can define any set of policies to access the inner private member. The following example is a basic implementation of your requirements:

namespace ConsoleApplication2
{
    using System;
    using System.Collections.Generic;
    using System.Collections;

    class B
    {
    }

    interface IEditable
    {
        void StartEdit();
        void StopEdit();
    }

    class EditContext<T> : IDisposable where T : IEditable
    {
        private T parent;

        public EditContext(T parent)
        {
            parent.StartEdit();
            this.parent = parent;
        }

        public void Dispose()
        {
            this.parent.StopEdit();
        }
    }

    class A : IEnumerable<B>, IEditable
    {
        private List<B> _myList = new List<B>();
        private bool editable;

        public void Add(B o)
        {
            if (!editable)
            {
                throw new NotSupportedException();
            }
            _myList.Add(o);
        }

        public EditContext<A> ForEdition()
        {
            return new EditContext<A>(this);
        }

        public IEnumerator<B> GetEnumerator()
        {
            return _myList.GetEnumerator();
        }

        IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator()
        {
            return this.GetEnumerator();
        }

        public void StartEdit()
        {
            this.editable = true;
        }

        public void StopEdit()
        {
            this.editable = false;
        }
    }

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            A a = new A();
            using (EditContext<A> edit = a.ForEdition())
            {
                a.Add(new B());
                a.Add(new B());
            }

            foreach (B o in a)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(o.GetType().ToString());
            }

            a.Add(new B());

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

Answer 5

You basically want to avoid to give away references to the class B items. That's why you should do a copy of the items.

I think this can be solved with the ToArray() method of a List object. You need to create a deep-copy of the list if you want to prevent changes.

Generally speaking: most of the times it is not worthwhile to do a copy to enforce good behaviour, especially when you also write the consumer.

Answer 6

public class MyList<T> : IEnumerable<T>{

    public MyList(IEnumerable<T> source){
        data.AddRange(source);
    }

    public IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator(){
        return data.Enumerator();
    }

    private List<T> data = new List<T>();
}

The downside is that a consumer can modify the items it gets from the Enumerator, a solution is to make deepcopy of the private List<T>.

Answer 7

It wasn't clear whether you also needed the B instances themselves to be immutable once added to the list. You can play a trick here by using a read-only interface for B, and only exposing these through the list.

internal class B : IB
{
    private string someData;

    public string SomeData
    {
        get { return someData; }
        set { someData = value; }
    }
}

public interface IB
{
    string SomeData { get; }
}

Answer 8

The simplest that I can think of is return a readonly version of the underlying collection if editing is no longer allowed.

public IList ListOfB
{
    get 
    {
        if (_readOnlyMode) 
            return listOfB.AsReadOnly(); // also use ArrayList.ReadOnly(listOfB);
        else
            return listOfB;
    }
}

Personally though, I would not expose the underlying list to the client and just provide methods for adding, removing, and enumerating the B instances.