Many instances of the same class by a loop

mrRsChief

I have a Class called horse. Its fields are name; color; age; sex. I would like to loop thru an arry of names like trigger; royal; crown; etc. I would like to do this. foreach (string name in arrayNames) { horse name = new horse(); } Now I have a class for each horses name. Can this be done. Thanks Ray

Dave Kreskowiak

You're creating a horse object, but then forgetting about it and it's being destroyed. You have to add each horse to a collection to keep it alive. You also should probably set the name of each horse after you create each instance of horse.

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Dave Kreskowiak

Wayne Gaylard

You should really declare a collection of Horses, and then in your loop, create a new Horse and give a name based on the current name in the array

List allHorses = new List();
foreach(string name in arrayNames)
{
horses.Add(new Horse(){ Name = name };
}

Everyone dies - but not everyone lives

V 0

In addition to previous answers I would create a Dictionary [^] instead of a List (given the horsename is unique).

Dictionary horses = new Dictionary();

then in your loop you can do:

foreach (string name in arrayNames)
{
horse h = new horse();
//set horse properties
horses.add(name, h);
}

later in code you can get the horse out of the collection using the name. In addition I would also add the name property to the horse object itself. Hope this helps.

V.
(MQOTD rules and previous solutions)

OriginalGriff wrote:

V is absolutely right

OriginalGriff

Just to add to the previous answers: you can't do that anyway.

foreach (string name in arrayNames)
{
horse name = new horse();
}

Because the declaration of your new horse inside the loop "hides" the name of the string used in the foreach - which will give you a compilation error:

A local variable named 'name' cannot be declared in this scope because it would give a different meaning to 'name', which is already used in a 'parent or current' scope to denote something else

Instead, you probably want to call it "horse" or similar so that you can access both the horse instance you just created and the name you want to give it. BTW: You should try to follow naming conventions as they make everything slightly more understandable. And one of the conventions is that class names start with an uppercase letter: "Horse" rather than "horse":

        string\[\] arrayNames = new string\[\] { "Trigger", "Royal", "Crown" };
        List<Horse> horses = new List<Horse>();
        foreach (string name in arrayNames)
            {
            Horse horse = new Horse();
            horse.Name = name;
            horses.Add(horse);
            }
    ...
    public class Horse
        {
        public string Name { get; set; }
        public int Age { get; set; }
        public Color Colour { get; set; }
        public string Sex { get; set; }
        }

Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952) Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)

BobJanova

Just to throw another thing in there, the most concise way to write this in modern C# is

var horses = arrayNames.Select(n => new horse { name = n }).ToList();

ToList is optional if you only ever want to enumerate over it, but it's probably what you want in this context.