Implicit and Explicit Operators in C#
For a side project I'm working on, explicit operators have come in handy in the data layer. With explicit operators, you can convert from one class to another using a user-defined conversion operator. For example:
public class MyClass
{
private int _id;
private string _description;
public int ID
{
get { return _id; }
set { _id = value; }
}
public string Description
{
get { return _description; }
set { _description = value; }
}
public static MyClass GetMyClass(int id)
{
return (MyClass)AnotherClass.GetRows(id);
}
public static explicit operator MyClass(DataTable dataTable)
{
MyClass myClass = new MyClass();
myClass.ID = Convert.ToInt32(dataTable.Rows[0]["ID"]);
myClass.Description = Convert.ToString(dataTable.Rows[0]["Description"]);
return myClass;
}
}
public class AnotherClass
{
public static DataTable GetRows(int id)
{
DataTable dataTable = new DataTable();
//...
return dataTable;
}
}
With implicit operators, you can implicitly convert from one class to another using a user-defined operator without casting. For example:
public class MyClass
{
private int _value;
public int Value
{
get { return _value; }
set { _value = value; }
}
public MyClass()
{
}
public MyClass(int value)
{
_value = value;
}
public static void SomeMethod()
{
MyClass myClass = new MyClass(2);
int id = myClass;
}
public static implicit operator int(MyClass myClass)
{
return myClass.Value;
}
}
Pretty cool, huh?
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