2 objects, exactly the same (except namespace) c#

Question

I'm using a 3rd party's set of webservices, and I've hit a small snag. Before I manually make a method copying each property from the source to the destination, I thought I'd ask here for a better solution.

I've got 2 objects, one of type Customer.CustomerParty and one of type Appointment.CustomerParty. The CustomerParty objects are actually property and sub-oject exactly the same. But I can't cast from 1 to the other.

So, I need to find a certain person from the webservice. I can do that by calling Customer.FindCustomer(customerID) and it returns a Customer.CustomerParty object.

I need to take that person that I found and then use them a few lines down in a "CreateAppointment" request. Appointment.CreateAppointment takes an appointment object, and the appointment object contains a CustomerParty object.

However, the CustomerParty object it wants is really Appointment.CustomerParty. I've got a Customer.CustomerParty.

See what I mean? Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Why don't you use AutoMapper? Then you can do:

TheirCustomerPartyClass source = WebService.ItsPartyTime();

YourCustomerPartyClass converted = 
    Mapper.Map<TheirCustomerPartyClass, YourCustomerPartyClass>(source);

TheirCustomerPartyClass original = 
    Mapper.Map<YourCustomerPartyClass, TheirCustomerPartyClass>(converted);

As long as the properties are identical, you can create a really simple map like this:

Mapper.CreateMap<TheirCustomerPartyClass, YourCustomerPartyClass>();
Mapper.CreateMap<YourCustomerPartyClass, TheirCustomerPartyClass>();

Answer 2

This scenario is common when writing domain patterns. You essentially need to write a domain translator between the two objects. You can do this several ways, but I recommend having an overridden constructor (or a static method) in the target type that takes the service type and performs the mapping. Since they are two CLR types, you cannot directly cast from one to the other. You need to copy member-by-member.

public class ClientType
{
    public string FieldOne { get; set; }
    public string FieldTwo { get; set; }

    public ClientType()
    {
    }

    public ClientType( ServiceType serviceType )
    {
        this.FieldOne = serviceType.FieldOne;
        this.FieldTwo = serviceType.FieldTwo;
    }
}

Or

public static class DomainTranslator
{
    public static ServiceType Translate( ClientType type )
    {
        return new ServiceType { FieldOne = type.FieldOne, FieldTwo = type.FieldTwo };
    }
}

Answer 3

I'm using a 3rd party's set of webservices...

Assuming you can't modify the classes, I'm not aware of any way you can change the casting behavior. At least, no way that isn't far, far more complicated than just writing a CustomerToAppointmentPartyTranslator() mapping function... :)

Assuming you're on a recent version of C# (3.5, I believe?), this might be a good candidate for an extension method.