Programming C#, Third Edition

Overloading Methods and Constructors

Often you’ll want to have more than one function with the same name. The most common example of this is to have more than one constructor. In the examples shown so far, the constructor has taken a single parameter: a DateTime object. It would be convenient to be able to set new Time objects to an arbitrary time by passing in year, month, date, hour, minute, and second values. It would be even more convenient if some clients could use one constructor, and other clients could use the other constructor. Function overloading provides for exactly these contingencies.

The signature of a method is defined by its name and its parameter list. Two methods differ in their signatures if they have different names or different parameter lists. Parameter lists can differ by having different numbers or types of parameters. For example, in the following code the first method differs from the second in the number of parameters, and the second differs from the third in the types of parameters:

void myMethod(int p1);
void myMethod(int p1, int p2);
void myMethod(int p1, string s1);

A class can have any number of methods, as long as each one’s signature differs from that of all the others.

Example 4-9 illustrates our Time class with two constructors: one that takes a DateTime object, and the other that takes six integers.

Example 4-9. Overloading the constructor

public class Time { // private member variables private int Year; private int Month; private int Date; ...