Creating a backup of an object

Question

I have a custom object that I want the user to edit, but before editing, I want to make a backup of the object that can be used to restore if necessary.

Basically, the user will have ObjectA that has all the information they need, they click Edit, a backup of ObjectA is created as ObjectB, the user can make changes to ObjectA, and then the user can hit cancel to discard any changes made to ObjectA which essentially just replaces ObjectA with the backup object, ObjectB.

What's the best way to make a new object instead of simply creating another reference to the object?

// User has their main object

CustomObject obj = new CustomObject();

// User clicks Edit and a copy of the object is stored in case obj needs to be restored

CustomObject backupObj = obj; // This only creates a reference but I'm not sure how else to show this

// User makes changes to obj but decides to discard those changes and clicks Cancel

obj = backupObj; // obj is restored

// User goes on with the program

You might also make a function `backup()` inside the CustomObject which can then `restore()`. — Frontear, Jan 09 '19 at 16:49
Possible duplicate of [Deep cloning objects](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78536/deep-cloning-objects) — Broots Waymb, Jan 09 '19 at 16:49
An other idea is you implement a `Clone` function, that will return a deep copy of your `CustomObject` — Pretasoc, Jan 09 '19 at 16:50

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 09 '19 at 16:54

The standard way is to implement the ICloneable:

class CustomObject : ICloneable
{
    ... your implementation
    public object Clone()
    {
        return this.MemberwiseClone();
    }
}

CustomObject obj = new CustomObject();
CustomObject backupObj = (CustomerObject) obj.Clone(); //backup
...
// later restore
obj = backupObj

MemberwiseClone() makes a shallow copy.

Creating a backup of an object

1 Answers1