I am wondering, since a lot of things can be done using reflection, can I change a private readonly field after the constructor completed its execution?
(note: just curiosity)
public class Foo
{
private readonly int bar;
public Foo(int num)
{
bar = num;
}
public int GetBar()
{
return bar;
}
}
Foo foo = new Foo(123);
Console.WriteLine(foo.GetBar()); // display 123
// reflection code here...
Console.WriteLine(foo.GetBar()); // display 456
You asked why you would want to break the encapsulation like that.
I use an entity helper class to hydrate entities. This uses reflection to get all the properties of a new empty entity, and matches the property/field name to the column in the resultset, and set's it using propertyinfo.setvalue().
I don't want anyone else to be able to change the value, but I don't want to take all the effort to custom code hydration methods for every entity either.
My many of my stored procs return resultsets that don't correspond directly to tables or views, so the code gen ORM's do nothing for me.