What I'm designing is a user control who's purpose is to gather a list of records from a SQL database based on criteria selected on the control and then transmit this list to various other systems or devices.
To accomplish this I've defined a .Net interface which each endpoint having a class that implements this interface. In this way the main application using the control can specify the system type it is sending the data too via an exposed method of the control. This method creates an instance of the the appropriate class, and when the send button on the control is pushed the class send method is called.
This is all working wonderfully save one catch. I have one particular system I'm sending data too that needs some additional parameters specified (specifically the version type of the other system). Currently this information is stored in the main application (in the project settings), so I can't just retrieve the information from SQL.
I'm looking for suggestions or ideas on the best way to handle this. I've considered:
1.)Adding a generic parameter(s) assingment method to the interface, however this would neccecitate adding methods to all classes implementing the interface, all but the particular one having methods that don't really do anything.
2.) Modifiing the original application to store and retrieve these pieces of information from SQL instead of storing them in the application settings. This would allow the particular class to retrive the information from sql instead, removing any need for the parent application to attempt to pass the info along.
Any thoughts, ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.