Indexer class in C#

While taking interviews for Microsoft.NET i often ask about indexer classes in C#.NET and i found that most of people are unable to give answer that how we can create a indexer class in C#.NET. We know the array in C#.NET and each element in array can be accessed by index same way for indexer class a object was class can be accessed by index. Its very easy to create a indexer class in C#. First lets looks some points related to indexer class in C#.

• Indexer class object can be accessed by index only.
• We can use same mechanism to access object of indexer class as we are doing it for array.
• You can can specify any valid C# type as return type of indexer classes.
• You must have to create a property with parameter using this keyword for indexer class.
• You can also implement multi parameter indexer also.

Let’s create simple indexer class with single parameter and for string type.

 public class MyIndexer
 {
     private string[] MyIndexerData;
     private int SizeOfIndexer;

     //declaring cursor to assing size of indexer
     public MyIndexer(int sizeOfIndex)
     {
         this.SizeOfIndexer = sizeOfIndex;
         MyIndexerData = new string[SizeOfIndexer];
     }

     public string this[int Position]
     {
         get
         {
             return MyIndexerData[Position];
         }
         set
         {
             MyIndexerData[Position] = value;
         }
     }
}

Now we done with indexer class and lets create object of that indexer class and will see output of our console application also. Following is the code for that.

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
 class Program
 {
     static void Main(string[] args)
     {
         int indexSize=5;
         MyIndexer objMyIndexer = new MyIndexer(indexSize);
         for (int i = 0; i < indexSize; i++)
         {
             objMyIndexer[i] = i.ToString();
             Console.WriteLine("Indexer Object Value-[{0}]: {1}",
         i, objMyIndexer[i]);
         }
         Console.ReadKey();
     }
 }
}

and Here is the output for the indexer class console application.

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