Refactoring and inheritance

Now that we’ve covered some of the ways refactoring can help organize your code, let’s dive into refactorings related to inheritance. This is a collection of refactorings that involve either overriding methods, introducing inheritance, or altering in-place inheritance relationships to improve the maintainability of code.

Overriding ToString

ToString is one of the four methods that any .NET object is guaranteed to have due to the virtual definition of ToString on System.Object. This method is used whenever an object is converted to a string and can be particularly handy for logging and debugging purposes.

Sometimes overriding ToString can simplify your code in unexpected ways.

Let’s look at the BuildFlightIdentifier method in FreightFlightInfo.cs. This method relies on the DepartureLocation and ArrivalLocation properties of type Airport to produce a string:

FreightFlightInfo.cs

public string BuildFlightIdentifier() ...