Overrides in VB.NET

This is one of a mini-series that covers the differences in Overloads, Shadows, and Overrides in VB.NET. This article covers Overrides. The articles that cover the others are here:

-> Overloads
-> Shadows

These techniques can be hugely confusing; there are a lot of combinations of these keywords and the underlying inheritance options. Microsoft's own documentation doesn't begin to do the topic justice and there is a lot of bad, or out of date information on the web. The best advice to be sure that your program is coded correctly is, "Test, test, and test again." In this series, we'll look at them one at a time with emphasis on the differences.

Overrides

The thing that Shadows, Overloads, and Overrides all have in common is that they reuse the name of elements while changing what happens. Shadows and Overloads can operate both within the same class or when a class inherits another class. Overrides, however, can only be used in a derived class (sometimes called a child class) that inherits from a base class (sometimes called a parent class). And Overrides is the hammer; it lets you entirely replace a method (or a property) from a base class.

In the article about classes and the Shadows keyword (See: Shadows in VB.NET), a function was added to show that an inherited procedure could be referenced.

Public Class ProfessionalContact
    ' ... code not shown ...
    Public Function HashTheName(
        ByVal nm As String) As String
        Return nm.GetHashCode
    End Function
End Class

The code that instantiates a class derived from this one (CodedProfessionalContact in the example) can call this method because it's inherited.

In the example, I used the VB.NET GetHashCode method to keep the code simple and this returned a fairly useless result, the value -520086483. Suppose I wanted a different result returned instead but,

-> I can't change the base class. (Maybe all I have is compiled code from a vendor.)

... and ...

-> I can't change the calling code (Maybe there are a thousand copies and I can't update them.)

If I can update the derived class, then I can change the result returned. (For example, the code could be part of an updatable DLL.)

There is one problem. Because it's so comprehensive and powerful, you have to have permission from the base class to use Overrides. But well designed code libraries provide it. (Your code libraries are all well designed, right?) For example, the Microsoft provided function we just used is overridable. Here's an example of the syntax.

Public Overridable Function GetHashCode As Integer

So that keyword has to be present in our example base class as well.

Public Overridable Function HashTheName(
    ByVal nm As String) As String

Overriding the method is now as simple as providing a new one with the Overrides keyword. Visual Studio again gives you a running start by filling in the code for you with AutoComplete. When you enter ...

Public Overrides Function HashTheName(

Visual Studio adds the rest of the code automatically as soon as you type the opening parenthesis, including the return statement which only calls the original function from the base class. (If you're just adding something, this is usually a good thing to do after your new code executes anyway.)

Public Overrides Function HashTheName(
    nm As String) As String
    Return MyBase.HashTheName(nm)
End Function

In this case, however, I'm going to replace the method with something else equally useless just to illustrate how it's done: The VB.NET function that will reverse the string.

Public Overrides Function HashTheName(
    nm As String) As String
    Return Microsoft.VisualBasic.StrReverse(nm)
End Function

Now the calling code gets an entirely different result. (Compare with the result in the article about Shadows.)

ContactID: 246
BusinessName: Villain Defeaters, GmbH
Hash of the BusinessName: 
HbmG ,sretaefeD nialliV

You can override properties too. Suppose you decided that ContactID values greater than 123 would not be allowed and should default to 111. You can just override the property and change it when the property is saved:

Private _ContactID As Integer
Public Overrides Property ContactID As Integer
    Get
        Return _ContactID
    End Get
    Set(ByVal value As Integer)
        If value > 123 Then
            _ContactID = 111
        Else
            _ContactID = value
        End If
    End Set
End Property

Then you get this result when a larger value is passed:

ContactID: 111
BusinessName: Damsel Rescuers, LTD

By the way, in the example code so far, integer values are doubled in the New subroutine (See the article on Shadows), so an integer of 123 is changed to 246 and then changed again to 111.

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