children of object

Question

I have a function that is supposed to return a UIElementCollection. The function takes in a UIElement that has the children property (i.e. stackpanel, grid, etc.) but does not know which UIElement it is, so I store it into a general object.

public UIElementCollection retCol (object givenObject){
...
}

I want to return the children of the givenObject, but I can't find a way to do so besides casting givenObject as a stackpanel or grid.

Is there a way I can get the children property of the givenObject?

Answer 1

StackPanel and Grid both inherit from Panel, so you could change your method to:

public UIElementCollection retCol (Panel givenObject){
    return givenObject.Children;
}

Or if you want to make it available to ALL UIElement types you could make it more general and check the type in the function:

public UIElementCollection retCol (UIElement givenObject){
    if(givenObject is Panel)
        return ((Panel)givenObject).Children;
    else if(givenObject is SomeOtherContainer)
        return ((SomeOtherContainer)givenObject).Children;

    else
        return null;
}