function() : this(null) {}

Question

Can someone please explain the following syntactic sugar?

protected MyConstructor() : this(null)

Mainly I am interested in this part: " : this(null) "

I know how protected, constructors and "this" keyword work, but am confused and cannot find any detailed information of the last part all put-together in all my online searches.

Edit: I should add that it is in a public abstract class. So I guess the constructor is calling the implementers constructor.

Thanks

Answer 1

This is a special syntax for constructors. You can have two basic variants:

protected MyConstructor() : this(null)

Calls the different overload of the constructor with the null parameter.

protected MyConstructor() : base(null)

Calls the constructor on a base class with the null parameter.

So, you can have a class like this:

class MyClass
{
  object someObject;

  public MyClass() : this(null) {}
  public MyClass(object someObject) { this.someObject = someObject; }
}

Now you can instantiate the class like this:

var c = new MyClass(); // c.someObject is null
var c2 = new MyClass(new object()); // c2.someObject is some new object instance

This is required because you can't reuse constructor code in any other way. If you were just overriding or overloading a method, the equivalent would look like this:

public void DoStuff()
{
  DoStuff(null);
}

public void DoStuff(object someObject)
{
  // Do some stuff
}

Answer 2

It calls another class constructor that has a parameter:

protected MyConstructor() : this(null) { }  // This calls the other constructor

protected MyConstructor(object whatever)
{
    Frob(whatever);
}

Answer 3

There is another constructor on that same object, which takes some sort of nullable object. For example:

public MyConstructor(string str)
{
   // A
}


public MyConstructor() : this(null)
{
   // B
}

In this example (changing constructors to public for demonstration purposes), if I call:

var newObj = new MyConstructor();

It will create a MyConstructor object, run the code in A first (passing in null as the parameter) then run the code in B next.

This is a way of allowing you to consolidate common code that needs to run regardless of what constructor is called.

Answer 4

What this(null) is doing is calling another constructor in the same class that takes one parameter, and passing a null value as that parameter. Look into constructor overloading for more info. Also, constructor chaining is more pertinent to your question, but I'd look into both topics.