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Attached methods
In Visual Objects, you could define methods to classes where you had no sources and that are defined in other libraries.
In the .NET Framework this is not possible, but since this is a very powerful language feature, you can use the Attached methods
to attach methods to another class where you have no sources. This works even with system classes and base datatypes (Everything is an object).
Please look at this code:
local cString as string local cResult as string cString := "Hello world!" cResult := cString:Left( 5 )
But the System.String
class has no Left()
method!
The solution is this one:
static class StringExtensions static method Left( self cString as string, nLen as int ) as string local cReturn as string if nLen >= cString:Length cReturn := cString else cReturn := cString:Substring( 0, nLen ) endif return cReturn
The secret lies in the first parameter: 'self cString as string
If you have defined this attached method in an assembly with a different namespace, this namespace of course must be included by a
using'' statement