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How to make a reference type property "readonly"

Asked 2009-03-25T12:09:35.563
13

I have a class Bar with a private field containing the reference type Foo. I would like to expose Foo in a public property, but I do not want the consumers of the property to be able to alter Foo... It should however be alterable internally by Bar, i.e. I can't make the field readonly.

So what I would like is:

      private _Foo;

      public Foo 
      { 
         get { return readonly _Foo; } 
      }

...which is of course not valid. I could just return a clone of Foo (assumming that it is IClonable), but this is not obvious to the consumer. Should I change the name of the property to FooCopy?? Should it be a GetCopyOfFoo method instead? What would you consider best practice? Thanks!

c# properties encapsulation readonly
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To clarify Jon Skeet's comment you can make a view, that is an immutable wrapper class for the mutable Foo. Here's an example: 

class Foo{
 public string A{get; set;}
 public string B{get; set;}
 //...
}

class ReadOnlyFoo{
  Foo foo; 
  public string A { get { return foo.A; }}
  public string B { get { return foo.B; }}
}
answered 2009-03-25T12:25:11.110

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