Overloading Constructors and Methods

Let’s get back to the Person class once more. Let’s look a bit different version of the class:

public class Person
{
  private string name;
  private int age;
  private int weight;
  private int height;


  public Person(string name)
  {
    this.name = name;
    this.age = 0;
    this.weight = 0;
    this.height = 0;
  }

  public double BodyMassIndex()
  {
    double heigthPerHundred = this.height / 100.0;
    return this.weight / (heigthPerHundred * heigthPerHundred);
  }

  public bool IsAdult()
  {
    if (this.age < 18)
    {
      return false;
    }
    return true;
  }

  public void GrowOlder()
  {
    this.age++;
  }

  public override string ToString()
  {
    return this.name + ", age: " + this.age;
  }
}

Initially all person objects are 0 years old, because the constructor sets the value of the instance variable age to 0.

public Person(string name)
{
  this.name = name;
  this.age = 0;
  this.weight = 0;
  this.height = 0;
}

Constructor Overloading

We would like to also be able to create Persons so that the constructor is given the age as well as the name as parameters. This is possible, because a class can have multiple constructors. Let’s make an alternative constructor. You don’t have to delete the old constructor.

public Person(string name)
{
  this.name = name;
  this.age = 0;
  this.weight = 0;
  this.height = 0;
}

public Person(string name, int age)
{
  this.name = name;
  this.age = age;
  this.weight = 0;
  this.height = 0;
}

Now we have two alternative ways to create objects.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
  Person paul = new Person("Paul", 24);
  Person ada = new Person("Ada");
  
  Console.WriteLine(paul);
  Console.WriteLine(ada);
}

Paul, age: 24
Ada, age: 0

This technique where a class has two or more constructors is called constructor overloading. A class can have multiple constructors which differ on the amount or type of their parameters. It is however not possible to have two constructor with exactly the same parameters. We cannot for example now add a constructor public Person(String name, int weight), because it is impossible for the compiler to differentiate this constructor with two parameters from the constructor where the int parameter means age.

Calling Your Constructor

As you might have noticed there is plenty of “copy paste” code in our overloaded constructors, meaning that there is repetition of same lines over and over again. When you look at the overloaded constructors above they have a lot of the same code. We are not happy with this. If we had even more constructors we would have to have the lines this.name in each constructor.

The first constructor the one that is only given a name as a parameter is actually a special case of the second constructor, which is given both name and age. What if the first constructor could call the second constructor? That is no problem, because you can call a constructor from another constructor using the this keyword tied to this exact object!

Let’s modify the first constructor so that it does not do anything itself, but calls the second constructor and asks it to set the age to 0.

//here the code of the second constructor is run, and the age is set to 0
public Person(string name) : this(name, 0)
{
}

public Person(string name, int age)
{
  this.name = name;
  this.age = age;
  this.weight = 0;
  this.height = 0;
}

The constructor call this(name, 0) might seem a bit weird. We can use this to have one constructor invocation call another constructor method, which reduces “copy paste code”. In the example above you could imagine the upper constuctor calling the lower one,with values name and 0. As the lower constructor already defines how those values are to be treated there is no need to separately define the variables in the upper constructor. This kind of constructor call does not change the code’s behavior and new objects can be created just like before.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
  Person paul = new Person("Paul", 24);
  Person ada = new Person("Ada");
  
  Console.WriteLine(paul);
  Console.WriteLine(ada);
}

Paul, age: 24
Ada, age: 0

Method Overloading

Like constructors methods can also be overloaded so you can have multiple versions of one method. Again the parameters of the different versions must be different. Let’s make another version of the GrowOlder() method, which ages the person the amount of years given to it as a parameter.

public void GrowOlder()
{
  this.age++;
}

public void GrowOlder(int years)
{
  this.age += years;
}

Below “Paul” is born 24 years old, first ages one year and then ages 10 years.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
  Person paul = new Person("Paul", 24);
  Console.WriteLine(paul);
  paul.GrowOlder();
  Console.WriteLine(paul);
  paul.GrowOlder(10);
  Console.WriteLine(paul);

}

Paul, age: 24
Paul, age: 25
Paul, age: 35

A Person class now has two methods called GrowOlder(). Which one is executed debends on the amount of parameters given.

We can also modify the program so that the method without parameters is implemented using the method GrowOlder(int years):

public void GrowOlder()
{
  this.GrowOlder(1);
}

public void GrowOlder(int years)
{
  this.age += years;
}

The calling of an overloaded method is a bit different than that of an overloaded constructor. The idea is still exactly the same. Rather than having the same code in two places we use this and tell what we are calling.

NOTICE! You cannot use the same notation which we used on a constructor, nor can you use this notation on a constructor. You can try what happens or which kind of errors you get.

You can now do the exercises for Overloading.