Check for references in a derived class

[umbral crest]

obligatory message to convert this to a thread.

[muted raft]

You could use a dictionary to hold each state. private Dictionary<Type, State> states;. Whenever you want to know if a state contains reference to another states simply iterate the dictionary.

You could create a virtual function public bool HasState(Type type) and each state define if it contains or not that state with this type.

If you want to use Generic you could do,

private Dictionary<Type, State> references = new Dictionary<Type, State>();

public bool HasState<T>() 
{
  return references.ContainsKey(typeof(T));
}

Alternatively, if you really, really do not want to use any of those approach you can use Reflection to inspect the content of the class. Not really something I would suggest doing over and over, but it can be justify in a initialization scenario.

[shut elbow]

You may want to let yourself be inspired by https://github.com/dotnet-state-machine/stateless

[umbral crest]

@muted raft Thanks for the suggestion. I think this will work for my purposes.

@Anikki This looks like a great resource. I appreciate the link!

[umbral crest]

Hello Again Simferoce,
I tried to implement a dictionary using the line you created.

I have the core class:

public class Core : NetworkBehaviour
{
    public Dictionary<Type, State> childStatesDictionary = new Dictionary<Type, State>();

    //Everything else
}

I also have OperateCannon which derives from PlayerState which derives from State.

public class OperateCannon : PlayerState

Finally, I have class that tries to pull a reference from the childStatesDictionary with this line:

OperateCannon operateCannon = core.childStatesDictionary[OperateCannon];

When I write this line, I get an error under OperateCannon that says this:

Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong?