Missed opportunity to use Cast¶
ID: cs/linq/missed-cast
Kind: problem
Security severity:
Severity: recommendation
Precision: high
Tags:
- maintainability
- language-features
Query suites:
- csharp-security-and-quality.qls
Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository
Casts are often used when you iterate over a collection of elements of a type that is known to contain only elements of a different type (possibly more specific). For example, List<Animal > might refer to a collection of instances of Dog, a class derived from Animal. Programmers often write a loop to iterate over the collection and cast each Animal in turn to Dog before using it
Recommendation¶
This pattern works well and is also available as the Cast method in LINQ. It is better to use a library method in preference to writing your own pattern unless you have a specific need for a custom version. In particular, this makes the code easier to read by expressing the intent better and reducing the number of distinct variables in scope within the loop. It is important to remember that Cast will throw a InvalidCastException if any of the elements cannot be cast. (If you are not sure that all of the elements have the expected type, and you only want to operate on the ones that do, then consider using OfType instead.)
Example¶
In this example, each element in the array of Animal’s is cast to Dog.
class MissedCastOpportunity
{
class Animal { }
class Dog : Animal
{
private string name;
public Dog(string name)
{
this.name = name;
}
public void Woof()
{
Console.WriteLine("Woof! My name is " + name + ".");
}
}
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
List<Animal> lst = new List<Animal> { new Dog("Rover"),
new Dog("Fido"), new Dog("Basil") };
foreach (Animal a in lst)
{
Dog d = (Dog)a;
d.Woof();
}
}
}
This could be written better using LINQ’s cast method to cast the whole list and then iterate over that.
class MissedCastOpportunityFix
{
class Animal { }
class Dog : Animal
{
private string name;
public Dog(string name)
{
this.name = name;
}
public void Woof()
{
Console.WriteLine("Woof! My name is " + name + ".");
}
}
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
List<Animal> lst = new List<Animal> { new Dog("Rover"),
new Dog("Fido"), new Dog("Basil") };
foreach (Dog d in lst.Cast<Dog>())
{
d.Woof();
}
}
}