using two different public properties to "get" the same private variable with different return types

Question

I've got a Customer class that has a List<string> Roles property. Much of the time I want to access that property as a list of strings, but on occasion I want to see it as a comma-delimited list.

I could certainly do that in a new method, and if I anticipated wanting to get the value of the variable in different formats (comma-delimited, tab-delimited, &ct) I would certainly do so. However, I'm toying with the idea of using two different properties to access the variable value, something along the lines of

public List<string> Roles 
{
    get { return this._Roles; }
    set { this._Roles = value; } 
}

and

public string RolesToString
{
    get { do some work here to comma-delimit the list; }
}

Essentially I want to override the ToString() method of this particular list. Are there compelling reasons for doing 1 over the other? Is using two different properties to return the same variable value sufficiently non-standard to cause red flags?

Answer 1

I would make your second "property" a method. It's doing additional processing on your list, and returning something that isn't a direct "property" of the object, but more a processed version of the object's property. This seems like a reasonable method candidate.

My preference would be:

public List<string> Roles 
{
    get { return this._Roles; }
    set { this._Roles = value; } 
}

public string GetRolesAsString()
{
    // Do processing on Roles
}

Answer 2

As Reed says it should probably be a Method, but thats kindof subjective.

Note that you don't need much code to do it - just a call to Join()

public string RolesAsString()
{
    return String.Join(", ", this._Roles);
}

And given that string joining is so easy in .NET, do you really need a method/property for it?

Answer 3

I have no problem with what you propose. Except I would name it RolesString.

But... Why only a getter? If I can set the Roles property, why could I not set the RolesString property?

Additional processing does not necessarily mean a method should be used.