How to properly setup class design for my program (C# .Net)

Question

I'm a self-taught beginning programmer. I've designed a horse racing program that reads in a file that has information on each horse in each race, including information on the horse's previous 10 races. Then outputs the information into a readable format, kind of like a horse racing form or program.

For example, on Saturday August 10th at Churchill Downs there are 9 races and 8 horses in each race. So, the csv file for that day would contain 72 horses. Each of those horses would also have statistics on their last 10 races.

What I have currently done is read in the csv file to a List. Then I transfer the information contained in the List to a List of Horse objects, which basically stores all the information for each horse.

I feel that the only benefit I'm getting from using a class to store all the information is that it's easier to manipulate that data as I don't have to remember indices.

I'm wondering if there's a better way to design this program? Any insight?

One key element of design is that you need to know what your program will DO. If all you're doing is reading in data from a text file into memory, it doesn't really matter how you store it. How should the user of your program interact with the data If it just calculates information and returns results, what kind of calculations will it do? These are the things that will help you determine your design. Since we don't know this, it's tough for us to say. — Mark Hildreth
It reads in a file, calculates a speed rating for all of the horses past races, then displays the speed rating along with all other non-calculated info, like raceDate, finalTime, racePurse, finishPosition, etc. I'm using Crystal Reports to display the info. The user does not interact with the data, it's read-only. — user1230593

devuxer devuxer · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-11T01:01:17

If you think about what's really going on here, you have horses, races, and a particular horse's performance in a particular race.

So, if you allow your class design to follow this, you might have something like this:

public class Horse
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public Gender Gender { get; set; }
    public Breed Breed { get; set; }
    public DateTime WhenBorn { get; set; }
    // etc...

    public TimeSpan GetAge()
    {
        return DateTime.Now - WhenBorn;
    }
}

public class Race
{
    public string Venue { get; set; }
    public DateTime WhenStarted { get; set; }
    public DateTime WhenFinished { get; set; }
    // etc...
}

public class HorseRace
{
    public Race Race { get; set; }
    public Horse Horse { get; set; }
    public int? PlaceFinished { get; set; } // null if did not finish
    public string JockeyName { get; set; }
    public double HorseWeighIn { get; set; } // weight of horse at time of race
    public double JockeyWeighIn { get; set; } // weight of jockey at time of race
    // etc...
}

public enum Gender
{
    Colt,
    Filly
}

public enum Breed
{
    // fill in breeds here
}

Once you have a class design you like, you can start thinking about how to store your data to make it easiest to get it into your classes. Instead of one giant csv file with a lot of repeated data, you could have a separate file for each class, so Horses.csv, Races.csv, HorseRaces.csv. Eventually, you may want to upgrade from CSV to a small file-based database.

Ultimately, you'd like to have three lists: Horses, Races, and HorseRaces. To display these lists, you could loop through your HorseRaces, and easily grab all the data you need simply by using the properties of HorseRace and, subsequently, properties of Race and Horse. For example, horseRace.Horse.Name.

How to properly setup class design for my program (C# .Net)

1 Answers