Property of generic type in non-generic class

Question

Intro

I'm working with the legacy code which contains two classes:

• I have a class which stores its value of System.Object type. (I named this class as DomainItem)
  • Its Identifier property refers to enum which holds information what a type of DomainItem is (in the context of business domain).
• There is also a class which stores these items as an Enumerable List. (DomainItems)

What's more:

• I don't want to change these classes into generic. This code is very sensitive and not covered by tests.
• In order to get DomainItem, I must get it from DomainItems.Items collection.

Code

The code for classes is equivalent as below:

public class DomainItem
{
    public Identifier Identifier { get; set; } // Readonly in the "real" code
    public object Value { get; set; }
}

public class DomainItems
{
    public IEnumerable<DomainItem> Items { get; set; }
}

The question is

How can I extend these classes using generics, to resolve type of Value property in the compile time. Is it even possible?

Example case might be as following:

DomainItem price = new DomainItem { Value = 25.20d, Identifier = Identifier.Price };
// ....
double priceValue = price.ProperValue; // generic property of type T

Obviously, above code is conceptual and it shows what I want to achieve. Any suggestions how to resolve that? Is it even possible?

Edit

My idea is to create a new IEnumerable<DomainItem<T>> where the collection is populated from non-generic DomainItem objects. Since the type of DomainItem.Value is known, it should be possible to make such collection somehow.

Answer 1

There's no such thing as a generic property, but you could easily create a generic method:

public T GetValue<T>() { ... }

public void SetValue<T>(T value) { ... }

You could then check typeof(T) within the method to make sure that it was appropriate for your identifier, ideally having made the identifier read-only. (It would be better as a constructor argument - I wouldn't expect it to make any sense to have a domain item whose identifier changed over time.)

Alternatively, you could just make the type of the Value property dynamic instead of object, assuming you're using C# 4+ with .NET 4+. Then your example code would compile - but it would perform an implicit (dynamic) conversion to double at execution time. You wouldn't get much safety there, but it would compile...