I recently started digging into C# but I can't by my life figure out how delegates work when implementing the observer/observable pattern in the language.
Could someone give me a super-simple example of how it is done? I have googled this, but all of the examples I found were either too problem-specific or too "bloated".
The observer pattern is usually implemented with events.
Here's an example:
using System;
class Observable
{
public event EventHandler SomethingHappened;
public void DoSomething() =>
SomethingHappened?.Invoke(this, EventArgs.Empty);
}
class Observer
{
public void HandleEvent(object sender, EventArgs args)
{
Console.WriteLine("Something happened to " + sender);
}
}
class Test
{
static void Main()
{
Observable observable = new Observable();
Observer observer = new Observer();
observable.SomethingHappened += observer.HandleEvent;
observable.DoSomething();
}
}
See the linked article for a lot more detail.
Note that the above example uses C# 6 null-conditional operator to implement DoSomething
safely to handle cases where SomethingHappened
has not been subscribed to, and is therefore null. If you're using an older version of C#, you'd need code like this:
public void DoSomething()
{
var handler = SomethingHappened;
if (handler != null)
{
handler(this, EventArgs.Empty);
}
}