Class Structure for a list Class?

Question

I am looking for some class structure help. Lets say I have a class called Dog holds information about the dog (name, weight, type) but because there could be multiple dogs, I would also like a class to hold all of these dogs, for use throughout my entire project. Whats the best way to go about doing this?

Just to have a DogList class, that stores the Dog class information into a public list? Allowing me to retrieve it at will?

Or should the list be a static within the original dog class? maybe in the constructor, any time someone creates a new dog, the dog gets put into the static list?

Edit: Sorry question was a bit miss leading Here is the structure I have so far, wondering if there is a better way to implement.

public class Dog
{
    public string name{get;set;}
    public int weight { get; set; }
}

public class DogFactory //not sure if thats the correct wording
{
    public List<dog> lstDogs = new List<dog>();
    public void setDogs()
    {
    Animal.Retrieve("Dog"); 
    //will retrieve a list of all dogs, with details, though this is costly to use
        foreach(Animal.Dog pet in Animal._Dogs)
        {
            Dog doggie = new doggie();
            doggie.Name = pet.Name;
            ...etc
            lstDog.add(doggie);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

The easiest way to make a list of dogs is:

List<Dog>

This is a strongly-typed list of Dogs using the List<T> class from System.Collections.Generic. You can make a class of this:

public class DogList : List<Dog>

Though this is usually not necessary unless you want to add properties specifically to a list of Dogs and not the dogs themselves.

UPDATE:

You usually do not need to create a dedicated list class when using List<T>. In most cases, you can do this:

public class DogService
{
    public List<Dog> GetAllDogs()
    {
        var r = new Repository(); // Your data repository
        return r.Dogs.ToList();   // assuming your repository exposes a 'Dogs query'
    }
}

If you're using LINQ to get your data, you can use the ToList() extension to return a List<T>, so no need to create a class that derives from List<T>.

Answer 2

Well, C# has a perfectly good List<> class already, so unless you have very specific needs I wouldn't go with a new DogList class. If you need to keep track of all created Dogs, then a static list inside the dog class is fine. Just make sure it's kept private and you have methods for adding or retrieving dogs. Better yet, your Dog factory can add them to the list for you (which I now see you mentioned yourself).