Conditional Property?

How can I make a class property available only if the class state meets certain criteria.

For example, if I have a class "Dog" with properties "CroppedTail" and "TailLength". I only want "TailLength" property to be visible to the user if "CroppedTail" is false.

Thanks,

Hammy

Visual C#5

I guess the question is why set taillength to 0 if it is cropped and then check if that value is zero to tell it is cropped or not..

To me it seems that you want subclasses... (One for croppedtails... and one for nocroppedtails (and a taillength property)).

Or just throw an exception in the TailLength property if CroppedTail is false.

I really wouldn't go down the route of having a base Dog class and a subclass for dogs with tails...

The all-out solution would be to have a Tail class with subclasses CroppedTail and UncroppedTail, then have a Tail property on the dog. Much better than subclassing the whole dog, and allows you to optionally crop the tail of a dog dynamically (if the Tail property is settable).

Of course this is a silly example, but in the kind of realistic cases that probably underlie your question, I find that there is often an aspect that is natural to factor out in a separate class.

Took me a while to get back to this thread.

Thanks for the replies, I will probably go with the sub class.