Using a Static Class to Initialize Members of another Static Class in ASP .NET

Question

Is there anyway for a static class to use values set in another static class from a different namespace to initialize some of it's members? Is there anyway to dictate the order they get established in?

e.g.

namespace Utility
{
    using Config;

    public static class Utility
    {
        public static UtilityObject myUtil = new UtilityObject(ConfigContext.myValue)
    }
}
...
// somewhere in a different file/project
...
namespace Config
{
    public static class ConfigContext
    {
        public static string myValue => ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["key"];
    }
}

This is a simplified example of the basic pattern I'm trying to accomplish; I would like to take values that are in a config file which are loaded into static class ConfigContext , and use them to initialize members of a static class Utility .

Move the using namespace_two statement outside of the namespace_one block and the code you have should work. — Jon P
– Jon P, Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 22:22
I don't know why you would want to do this but at least to me, it's a code smell. Looking to "dictate the order they get established in" suggests a temporal dependency. What does that even mean? Static class instances are created when you try to use them. — JuanR
– JuanR, Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 22:22
Yeah this is a hyper simplified example of what I'm trying to do but the core concept is the same. Basically I want to use values in a Config file that get loaded into a static ConfigContext to initialize members of a static Utility class. — user3776749
– user3776749, Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 22:24
Awesome. Thank you. I fail to see the problem. It looks like it should work although I wouldn't recommend this pattern. Not very unit-testable. — JuanR
– JuanR, Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 22:34
By the way, in case it's not obvious, I am not a big fan of static classes... :-P — JuanR
– JuanR, Commented Jan 7, 2020 at 22:39

John Wu · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-07 23:02:15Z

1

You can't dictate the order of static initialization. But you can avoid the problem entirely by deferring initialization using lazy logic.

public static class Utility
{
    private static Lazy<UtilityObject> _myUtil = null;

    private static Utility()
    {
        _myUtil = new Lazy<UtilityObject>( () => new UtilityObject(ConfigContext.myValue) );
    }

    public static myUtil => _myUtil.Value;
}

Using this technique, the utility object isn't initialized until it is actually used.

If the logic to initialize ConfigContext has a similar issue, you can use a Lazy there too, and all of your lazy fields will get initialized in a cascading fashion, in the order they are needed.

answered Jan 7, 2020 at 23:02

John Wu

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