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I am working with an app that handles appointment scheduling.

Right now what I am doing is generating a list of people to call for confirmations in a confirmations section and a list of people to call for rescheduling in a rescheduling section.

I have two separate, but very similar (nearly identical) domain classes for the confirmation items and the rescheduling items.

I have two nearly identical methods in my scheduling service that handle list generation.

I would like to only use one method in the service that would handle the list generation for both of these. The only real difference between the two service methods is which table is being referenced.

My problem is that I can't dynamically change which domain class I am using based on what mode the user is interacting with (confirmations/rescheduling). I get a cannot implicitly convert type error.

I thought a solution would be to create a parent domain class "scheduling item" and have the confirmation item and scheduling item be children of that. However, I still can't figure out how to reference them in the service method.

I thought I could declare a var and then assign it to whichever domain I wanted based on the mode the user is in. That also gets an error because it wants the var's type to be declared in advance.

I am relatively new to C# and I could really use some advice on the best way to simplify this and not have two nearly identical sets of code.

I realize I could just use one class for both, but that would not be ideal, because I would like to keep the data separate for the two domains.

I cannot share the actual code. I figure with the information I have given though, someone might be able to tell me how to handle one service method for two related domain classes.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

To clarify, our set up is like this: There is a class ConfirmationItem and a class ReschedulingItem that are models for the Mongo database tables.

The Scheduling Service has two methods currently that are "GenerateConfirmationItemList"/"GenerateReschedulingItemList".

The way these methods access the data is like this:

var confirmationItems = GenericRepository.Table<ConfirmationItem>().Where(...).ToList();
var reschedulingItems = GenericRepository.Table<ReschedulingItem>().Where(...).ToList();

Other than these initial table references, the logic is identical.

What would be really helpful is if I could have the method choose which table to use based on what mode we are in (Confirmation or Rescheduling).

However, if I try something like:

var scheduling items;

switch(mode) 
case "confirmation": 
{
  schedulingItems = GenericRepository.Table<ConfirmationItem>().Where(...).ToList();
}

This gets an error because implicitly typed vars have to be assigned.

Craig5117
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    One common approach would be to define an interface, let your models implement that interface and let your service accept that interface. It would help if you would add some code to clarify the problem, esp. if you have errors. – Christoph Lütjen Nov 07 '21 at 14:18
  • @ChristophLütjen I added a little clarification. If I were to implement an interface where would you suggest it be defined? In the service or in the same place the classes are defined? – Craig5117 Nov 08 '21 at 14:54
  • There's not enough code for me to understand the problem. You can easily switch on the generic type of a method see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53597845/switch-based-on-generic-argument-type – Christoph Lütjen Nov 08 '21 at 21:12

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