Wednesday, 27 July 2016

c# - AddRange to a Collection



A coworker asked me today how to add a range to a collection. He has a class that inherits from Collection. There's a get-only property of that type that already contains some items. He wants to add the items in another collection to the property collection. How can he do so in a C#3-friendly fashion? (Note the constraint about the get-only property, which prevents solutions like doing Union and reassigning.)



Sure, a foreach with Property. Add will work. But a List-style AddRange would be far more elegant.



It's easy enough to write an extension method:




public static class CollectionHelpers
{
public static void AddRange(this ICollection destination,
IEnumerable source)
{
foreach (T item in source)
{
destination.Add(item);
}
}

}


But I have the feeling I'm reinventing the wheel. I didn't find anything similar in System.Linq or morelinq.



Bad design? Just Call Add? Missing the obvious?


Answer



No, this seems perfectly reasonable. There is a List.AddRange() method that basically does just this, but requires your collection to be a concrete List.


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