Need help exposing a collection of objects as a property

[hellswraith]

Does anyone have any code that does this?

I have a parent object, that needs to expose a collection of child objects.

So, this seems all well and good, but I am finding it difficult to find some code to get me started.

I basically need it to function like the dataset class. It is the parent class, that can hold table objects. I will then have to make it bindable so I will be implementing the IList interface.

If anyone has done this, the proper way, I would appreciate any help.

[hellswraith]

Just to let you know, this is the code I have found so far...

Private mWidgets(42) As Widget
 
Public Property Widgets(ByVal i As Integer) As Widget
   Get
      Return mWidgets(i)
   End Get
   Set(ByVal value As Widget)
      mWidgets(i) = value
   End Set
End Property

[Edneeis]

I'm not sure I understand what you are trying, but I would make Three objects, The Controller (Parent), the Detail (Child), the Collection (Strongly Typed Collection of Child). Then you'd expose the collection via a readonly property of type collection (strongly typed).

Public Class State
 
   Dim _Items as New CityCollection
 
   Public ReadOnly Property Cities() As CityCollection
   Get
      Return _Items 
   End Get
End Property
 
End Class
 
Public Class City
 
   Public Name As String
 
End Class
 
Public Class CityCollection
   Inherits CollectionBase
 
   Public Property Items(ByVal index As Integer) As City
   Get
      Return MyBase.InnerList(index)
   End Get
   Set(ByVal value As City)
      MyBase.InnerList(index) = value
   End Set
   End Property
 
End Class

Its a bit more code but it works in a good structure and makes the pieces more independant and binding may be easier.

[hellswraith]

Thanks. I will look into how that will fit into what we are doing and see which would be better.

The basic need here is to create a object heirarchy that represents rows in multiple related tables in the database, and allow the UI code to bind to the objects.

We are trying to move away from the quick and dirty app dev into fully OO applications whenever we can.