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POCreating an extensible properties class (OOP)
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copied!<p>I have an application which supports multiple types and versions of some devices. It can connect to these devices and retrieve various information.</p> <p>Depending on the type of the device, I have (among other things) a class which can contain various properties. Some properties are common to all devices, some are unique to a particular device.</p> <p>This data is serialized to xml.</p> <p>What would be a preferred way to implement a class which would support future properties in future versions of these devices, as well as be backwards compatible with previous application versions?</p> <p>I can think of several ways, but I find none of them great:</p> <ul> <li>Use a collection of name-value pairs: <ul> <li><strong>pros</strong>: good backward compatibility (both xml and previous versions of my app) and extensibility,</li> <li><strong>cons</strong>: no type safety, no intellisense, requires implementation of custom xml serialization (to handle different <code>value</code> objects)</li> </ul></li> <li>Create derived properties class for each new device: <ul> <li><strong>pros</strong>: type safety</li> <li><strong>cons</strong>: have to use <code>XmlInclude</code> or custom serialization to deserialize derived classes, no backward compatibility with previous xml schema (although by implementing custom serialization I <em>could</em> skip unknown properties?), requires casting for accessing properties in derived classes.</li> </ul></li> <li>Another way to do it?</li> </ul> <p>I am using C#, by the way.</p>

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