it’s a tough one… if you derive from a request class, you’re always going to add _something_ to it. That ‘something’ is pretty much always an important part of the value semantics of an instance of your request type, and as such it needs to be taken into account when doing the equality and hashcode checks in the context of caching

i’m still not entirely sure on it though, which is why the check hasn’t been committed to the project yet

The only thing i’m forcing people to do is to make sure they have valid implementations of Equals and GetHashCode for _their_ situation and only if they want to use caching for that particular type of request.

To be precise, what your code here does is force the user to have an override of Equals and GetHashCode on the most-derived class. If they override on a base class and then inherit from it, their classes will fail your test, even though Equals and GetHashCode may be fully functional. Is this the behavior you want?

If not, Leon’s approach should work better for you.

you do have to put an attribute on top of your request class to enable caching for it so there is some kind of explicitness (though not entirely obviously), response types don’t need to be altered in any way though.

The only thing i’m forcing people to do is to make sure they have valid implementations of Equals and GetHashCode for _their_ situation and only if they want to use caching for that particular type of request. I agree that it’s not ideal, but it’s the only way i could come up with to make it work.

Btw, how this “check if Equals&GetHashCode are overridden” thing is going to work with a case of base class implementing those 2 methods? You pretty much force people to have redundant, “base” forwarding implementations then.

Yeah, but like Steve said it wouldn’t help

That won’t help since System.Object already implements those methods.

great stuff, didn’t know about that

\override RETURN-Type MethodName(…)\

At least from my understanding

static bool IsMethodOverriden(Type type, string methodName)
{
var mi = type.GetMethod(methodName, BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly);
return ((mi.Attributes & MethodAttributes.Virtual) != 0) &&
((mi.Attributes & MethodAttributes.VtableLayoutMask) == MethodAttributes.ReuseSlot);
}

Also, for your use case, I believe you want to include BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly, so that it doesn’t search up the hierarchy, but maybe not…