DevLog

A nice post I passed through today: Fluent Interface.

It is a very nice programming style of adding "method-action" functionalities on an object. It makes you write less code and clear one! For instance, you can build Query-Like objects in an API using this style of fluent interface. Here is a sample code that shows how a C# object implements the fluent interface by adding "action-methods", where each method does a certain action "setting a value on an internal field" and return an instance of the object itself, here is the code:

public class CustomStringList
{
    List<string> innerList = null;

    public CustomStringList()
 {
        this.innerList = new List<string>();
 }

    public CustomStringList AddValue(string value)
    {
        this.innerList.Add(value);
        return this;
    }

    public CustomStringList RemoveValue(string value)
    {
        this.innerList.Remove(value);
        return this;
    }

    public int Count
    {
        get
        {
            return this.innerList.Count;
        }
    }
} 

Now to use the above object, you can write something as:

        CustomStringList stringList =
            new CustomStringList()
            .AddValue("ASP.NET")
            .AddValue("Bilal")
            .AddValue("Wessam")
            .AddValue("Haissam")
            .AddValue("Sami")
            .AddValue("C#")
            .RemoveValue("Bilal");

        int numberOfElements= stringList.Count;

Hope you liked this post, as I am very impressed by this style and I have in mind so many ideas to build based on this fluent interface concept! You can read more on Fluent Interface here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent_interface

Regards

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