Collection Generator

Overview

The Collection Generator component creates .Net source code for a type-safe collection class. A type-safe collection only allows objects of a specific type to be added to or inserted into it, all of the collection members that deal with the collected items are of the type of the collected class rather than Object. With a type-safe collection, calling code does not have to constantly cast the items returned from collection members to the relevant type. Any attempt by calling code to add an object of the wrong type to the collection will be spotted at design time, as the code will not compile. Even when using late bound objects, any attempt to add an object of the wrong type to the collection at run-time will result in an exception.

Access to the Collection Generator component is provided by a wizard that is used to capture the relevant generator properties. The wizard has two client modes, it can be displayed by the Visual Studio 2005/2008 add-in provided by Blayd Software or it can be displayed by the Blayd Software standalone client. The standalone client is provided for users who do not have Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008 installed on their machine, it does not have a dependency on any of the extensibility interfaces required by an add-in. The add-in and the standalone clients are both included in the installer package and you can choose to install either the add-in or the standalone client or both.

.Net Language Support

The Collection Generator can generate source code for any .Net language for which there is a code provider. A code provider is a class that derives from the framework's System.CodeDom.Compiler.CodeDomProvider class. There is direct (explicit) support for C# and Visual Basic and there is a language category of "Other" to accommodate other .Net languages. When selecting "Other" you also have to specify the fully qualified name of the required code provider class. The chosen language must support collection class types, so, for example, it must support indexers (Item property).

Features

The Collection Generator generates source code for a collection class as follows:

• Basic type safe CollectionBase derived collection with a specified type name that only allows objects of the specified collected class type to be added to or inserted into it. The collection may be created in a specified namespace or in the default namespace. If the collected class is not in the same namespace as the collection, a namespace imports statement can be added to the collection class.
• Basic type safe CollectionBase derived collection with a specified type name that only allows null reference entries and objects of the specified collected class type to be added to or inserted into it. The collection may be created in a specified namespace or in the default namespace. If the collected class is not in the same namespace as the collection, a namespace imports statement can be added to the collection class.
• Type safe NameObjectCollectionBase derived collection with a specified type name that only allows named instances of the specified collected class type to be added to it. The collection may be created in a specified namespace or in the default namespace. If the collected class is not in the same namespace as the collection, a namespace imports statement can be added to the collection class.
• Variants of a type safe NameObjectCollectionBase derived collection including any combination of the following; null entries, duplicate names, empty names and null names.
• A type safe collection that has a Synchronized method and a nested thread-safe wrapper class that provides synchronized access to the collection.
• A type safe collection that has documentation comments assigned to the collection class and all of its protected and public members. A documentation comment line prefix may be specified to accommodate third-party documenters for .Net languages that do not have built-in support for documentation comments.
• Various other combinations of the options outlined above...