在C＃中初始化复杂的结构/对象

Question

I am working on a project that is using a massive collection of messages in it's communication, in previous projects using C I've worked with these messages as nested arrays of structs

 struct message { int value1; int value2; params[] parameters; } struct params { int value3; int value4; } message messageList[2] = { { 1, 2, { 1, 1 }}, { 3, 4, { 2, 2 }}, null } /* not perfect but you get the idea */ 

I'm trying to do the same in C# but so far I've run into issues at every turn.

The end goals:

• One large file with all the message definitions, these must be:
  • Organized/Readable (someone reviewing definitions should understand what is going on)
  • Compact (100 messages shouldn't take 10,000 LOC)
  • Flexible (array lengths)
• Message definitions are parsed into an array of objects with nested objects
  • Parsing/initialization needn't be super fast, only happens on startup on a PC
• the resulting list of objects is immutable. (forgot to mention this first round)

I thought the best way to do this was similar to C, using structs, but the initialization of C# structs is as messy/complex as initializing objects, and neither would make for an easy to maintain list of all the messages, parameters, etc.

Can anyone help me out here? Is structs the way to go or is there something else that would be better?

Answer 1

The C# equivalent of your example would be the following:

public class Params
{
    public int value3;
    public int value4;
}

public class Message
{
    public int value1;
    public int value2;
    public Params[] parameters;
}

Message[] messageList =
{
    new Message { value1 = 1, value2 = 2, parameters = new[] { new Params { value3 = 1, value4 = 1 } } },
    new Message { value1 = 3, value2 = 4, parameters = new[] { new Params { value3 = 2, value4 = 2 } } }
};

Answer 2

You really should use a class for this, not a struct . This type violates most of the rules for when struct would be appropriate.

As for initializing - if you used List<T> , you could use collection initializers to simplify the creation and usage. Instead of hard coding the initialization in the code, you could parse a file to create the objects on startup.