Limitations of ArrayLists in C#

Introduction

Generics are new feature provided with version 2.0 of the Microsoft.Net framework. Generic classes and methods combine re-usability, type safety and efficiency in a way that there non-generics counterparts do not/cannot.

In this part some features of ArrayLists and there shortcomings/limitations will be discussed. The codein this article has been written in Visual Studio 2005 in C#.

Earlier ArrayLists used to server the purpose, but that in a certain limit. Moreover, using ArrayLists to store different types came as a good performance cost. At the client end it shows our desired type that we are storing in the ArrayList but internally there's much more that goes on.

Example

System.Collections.ArrayList myList = new System.Collections.ArrayList();
myList.Add(22);
myList.Add("C# Generics");
myList.Add(22.45);

The usage convenience that is perceived above comes at a cost. Any reference or value type that is stored or added in the ArrayList (myList) is implicitly upcasted to System.Object type. And while retrieval, the reverse happens- downcasting to the appropriate type takes place.

Moreover, there is compromise on the Type Safety front also. Consider the code below

int item = 0;
// This will cause an InvalidCastException

foreach (int x in myList)
{
    item = item + x;
}

The reason is evident.

In .Net 1.x type-safety was achieved by writing your own typed ArrayList. But again, in that case re-usability was a major issue. Consider the following code.

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace ArrayListSample
{
    #region Person Class

    class Person
    {
        String Name;
        Int32 Age;
        String Address;

        #region Constructor

        public Person() { }

        public Person(String Name, Int32 Age, String Address)
        {
            this.Name = Name;
            this.Age = Age;
            this.Address = Address;
        }

        public Person(String Name, Int32 Age)
        {
            this.Name = Name;
            this.Age = Age;
            this.Address = String.Empty;
        }

        public Person(String Name, String Address)
        {
            this.Name = Name;
            this.Age = 0;
            this.Address = Address;
        }

        public Person(String Name)
        {
            this.Name = Name;
            this.Age = 0;
            this.Address = String.Empty;
        }

        #endregion
    }

    #endregion

    #region PeopleCollection Class

    class PeopleCollection : IEnumerable
    {
        private ArrayList arPeople = new ArrayList();

        public PeopleCollection()
        {
        }

        #region Methods

        public void AddPeople(Person p)
        {
            arPeople.Add(p);
        }

        public void ClearPeople()
        {
            arPeople.Clear();
        }

        int Count;

        public int PeopleCount
        {
            get { return Count; }
        }

        #endregion

        #region IEnumerable Members

        public IEnumerator GetEnumerator()
        {
            return arPeople.GetEnumerator();
        }

        #endregion
    }

    #endregion

    class Client
    {
        public static void Main()
        {
            PeopleCollection myPeople = new PeopleCollection();
            myPeople.AddPeople(new Person("Saurabh", 24, "Gurgaon"));
            myPeople.AddPeople(new Person("Manu"));

            foreach (Person person in myPeople)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(person);
            }

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

The above code does achieve type safety but then we will have to write an almost identical custom collection for each type we wish to contain. Because

myPeople.AddPeople(new Car());

would be a compile time error, since the code/approach above achieves type safety. So at the end of the day it will be a big nightmare !!

So above we find some of the limitations of ArrayLists. In the nextarticle we will find how Generics solve the issues discussed above.