Confused about inheritance in c#

Question

I have a base class looking like this:

public class BaseController : Controller {
}

Classes that inherit this:

public class ABC : BaseController {
   public void Create(string a, string b) {
      var Meta = new Meta();
      Meta.Title = "test";
   }
}

public class DEF : BaseController {
   public void Create(string a, string b, string c) {
      var Meta = new Meta();
      Meta.Title = "job";
   }
}

Every one of the classes that inherits from BaseController needs to create an instance of Meta();

Is there some way that I could move this creation from the classes ABC & DEF into the base controller? Note that some of the methods in classes ABC, DEF etc have different number of arguments.

One idea I had for this was to do the following in the BaseController:

    public Meta Meta { get; set; }
    protected override void Initialize(RequestContext requestContext)
    {
        if (Meta == null) { Meta = new Meta(); }
    }

Is this a valid thing to do. Also if I did this in the BaseController then would the field Meta be available in classes that inherit from the BaseController?

Answer 1

I'd probably do it like below. And yes, you can access meta if you define it protected (or public of course).

public class BaseController : Controller { 
   protected Meta meta;

   public void Create() { 
      meta = new Meta(); 
   } 
}

public class ABC : BaseController { 
   public void Create(string a, string b) { 
      base.Create();
   } 
} 

public class DEF : BaseController { 
   public void Create(string a, string b, string c) { 
      base.Create();
   } 
} 

Answer 2

I would do something like this:

public class BaseController : Controller {
    protected Meta Meta { get; set; }
    protected void Create()
    {
        if (Meta == null) { Meta = new Meta(); }
    }
}

public class ABC : BaseController {
   public void Create(string a, string b) {
      base.Create();
   }
}

public class DEF : BaseController {
   public void Create(string a, string b, string c) {
      base.Create();
   }
}

If you only want access to Meta from the base class then make meta private . If you want access to Meta only from things that inherit from the base class then you make it protected . If you want anything that creates an instance of ABC or DEF to have access to Meta too then make it public .