Elegant design of simulating a read-only object

Question

Hi, I am currently developing an GUI to an embedded system. (I am using GUI to descripe my app opposed to interface to avoid confusion with the progamatic meaning)

Context

I have created a class which simulates the embedded system. I do all my communications through a Connection class I have designed which can communicate via TCP/Serial or a virtual connection between two Connection objects.

All this works nicely and as expected, my simulated object and GUI communicate via the virtual connection.

I have a Diagnostic packet which is sent from the device (real or simulated) and read by the GUI. This fits nicely into a class which I have called ControllerDiagnostic.

Question

My question relates to the ControllerDiagnostic class. On the GUI side all properties should be read-only (DeSerialization is done via reflection on the private fields directly). On the simulation side they clearly need to be mutable. So how do I handle this elegantly? I've considered:

• Creating a completely new class which mimics ControllerDiagnostic but exposes setting of the fields.
• Creating all fields in ControllerDiagnostic protected then inheriting into a private nested class which provides accessors to these fields within the simulation class.
• Creating an assembly with just two classes and using an Internal setter.
• Leave the properties as read/write and document the GUI should not modify them.
• Re-writing C# so I could use friend in the same way I can in C++.

None of these seem ideal to me.

Thanks

Answer 1

You could write an interface which exposes all properties of your class with getters and setters and a second interface which only exposes the getters for all your properties. Then have a single class implement both interfaces and use the getter-only interface in the GUI.

In code that could look somewhat like this:

public interface IReadWrite
{
    string SomeString { get; set; }
}

public interface IReadOnly
{
    string SomeString { get; }
}

public class TestClass : IReadWrite, IReadOnly
{
    public string SomeString { get; set; }
}