I've been working on a simple inventory system in C#, and I noticed that every item I create is essentially the same: just a field and a getter, with the only difference being the type of the item. I thought this would be a good opportunity to use a generic class, but now I'm facing a couple of issues. Firstly, I can't seem to store items of different types in the same collection. Secondly, my current approach requires me to tag every item so that other systems know what to do with them. I'm stuck on how to handle the first issue aside from just creating separate classes for each item type. I'm also concerned about how to express what each item actually does with this method; for instance, an integer could signify healing or a stat increase. The only solutions I can think of involve using enums or string tags, which don't seem very extensible to me, or increasing the boilerplate by making each item type its own object. So, am I over-abstracting my design, or is this level of abstraction appropriate and I'm just missing the right solution?
1 Answer
It sounds like you might be overcomplicating things a bit. If you want to handle different types of items in the same inventory without creating separate classes for each, consider using inheritance. You could have a base class like `Item` and then create subclasses for specific item types, like `Weapon` or `Potion`. This way, everything still gets treated as an `Item`, making it easier to manage your inventory while still allowing for type-specific properties and methods. Pretty common in OOP!
Exactly! With inheritance, your inventory can hold an array of `Item` objects, and each item can have its own unique behavior while still fitting into the overall structure. It clears up a lot of the confusion.