Elegant way to reuse a method handler

[Tim Jarvis]

Hi,

I am using a toolbar object that has a number of buttons that generally
speaking have a corresponding menu item. What I was hoping to be able
to do was to write an event handler for the menu item and assign it to
the click event of the toolbar button.

But I find that the toolbar buttons don't have a click event at all, I
have to write a handler in the buttonclick event of the toolbar itself
which in turn gets a ToolbarButtonClickEventArgs param passed that I
can use to determine which button was clicked. Which leads to code like
the following

if (e.Button == btnSomething)
{
mnuSomthing_Click(this,EventArgs.Empty);
}
else
{
if (e.button == btnSomethingElse)
{
mnuSomthingElse_Click(this,EventArgs.Empty);
}
}

Surely there is a better way than this...surely.

Cheers Tim.

[Shiv Kumar]

Tim,

There are number of ways that can be termed as "better". Some may be an
overkill given the situation at hand.

Lets say you had a class that takes a certain delegate type as a parameter
in their constructor. This delegate instance is the actual method you'd like
each instance to "call".

You stuff instances of these classes into a hash table using the name of the
button as the key (identifier).

So the code in your event would look like this

ht.Add(xxxButton.Name, new MyObject(new
SomeDelegate(TheActualMethodForThisButton)));
and so on for each button you have.

Then in the buttonclick event

((MyObject)ht[e.Button.Name]).Execute(this, EventArgs.Empty);

Where MyObject is the class type that has an Execute method whose
implementation in turn calls the delegate passed to it in the constructor.
I hope you get the picture. Also, I don't know if "Button" has a Name
property, but any other "identifier" will do.
--
Shiv R. Kumar
http://www.matlus.com

[Tim Jarvis]

Shiv Kumar wrote:

I hope you get the picture. Also, I don't know if "Button" has a Name
property, but any other "identifier" will do.

mmm, interesting approach. I'll look at this in more detail.

Cheers Tim.

[Shiv Kumar]

Probably a simpler solution (one that is more fitting for this job) is to
simply stuff the delegate into the hashtable, rather than have an object
that has a method that calls a delegate etc.

--
Shiv R. Kumar
http://www.matlus.com