Expression Bodied Collection Property Initialization Gotcha in C#

This is a post from 2017 but as I was re-learning Trie I read it over and made it available here 🙂

I was implementing a trie, which is a tree data structure, usually for storing strings for searching. Since it’s a tree, it has a “Children” for holding child nodes.

But then I ran into a problem where simply calls to adding children to a collection (Line# 9) didn’t work.

	private void Insert(TrieNode current, string word)
	{
	foreach (char c in word)
	{
	current.Children.TryGetValue(c, out TrieNode node);
	if (node == null)
	{
	node = new TrieNode();
	current.Children.Add(c, node);
	}
	current = node;
	}
	current.IsCompleteWord = true;
	}

view raw insert.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

After 30 minutes of debugging, I was like…

Just what the h**l happened?

TL;DR

Auto Property initialization creates a backing field while Expression Bodied property one does not

▬ Introduction ▬

According to Wikpedia, you can declare a trie like this (in Haskell).

	import Data.Map
	data Trie a = Trie { value :: Maybe a,
	children :: Map Char (Trie a) }

view raw Trie.hs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

So I created a TrieNode class as shown below.

	public class TrieNode
	{
	public bool IsCompleteWord { get; set; } = false;
	public Dictionary<char, TrieNode> Children => new Dictionary<char, TrieNode>();
	}

view raw TrieNode.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

*If you are an astute reader, you might have already spotted the problem. Congratulations!*

▬ Problem ▬

The complete source for building a trie, TrieBuilder is declared as below.

	public class TrieBuilder
	{
	public TrieNode BuildTrie(IEnumerable<string> words)
	{
	TrieNode root = new TrieNode();
	foreach (var word in words)
	{
	Insert(root, word);
	}
	return root;
	}
	private void Insert(TrieNode current, string word)
	{
	foreach (char c in word)
	{
	current.Children.TryGetValue(c, out TrieNode node);
	if (node == null)
	{
	node = new TrieNode();
	current.Children.Add(c, node);
	}
	current = node;
	}
	current.IsCompleteWord = true;
	}
	}

view raw TrieBuilder.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Given a list of words passed to BuildTrie method, it populates a trie and returns an object instance.

Insert method simply checks for an existence of a character and maps current character to a node to the trie object instance , current.

This is where the problem occurred. current.Children.Add(...) wasn’t adding node object instance.

▬ Investigation ▬

Later on, I found out a StackOverflow answer explanating that declaring a property with => syntax (introduced in C# 6) does NOT create a backing field.

So my declaration below,

public Dictionary<char, TrieNode> Children => new Dictionary<char, TrieNode>();

view raw Children1.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

is equivalent to

	public Dictionary<char, TrieNode> Children
	{
	get { return new Dictionary<char, TrieNode>(); }
	}

view raw Children2.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

returning a new array whenever Children property was accessed, thus not adding a new node to it.

▬ Solution ▬

The fix is simple. Declare Children with a backing field or use an auto property initialization syntax.

public Dictionary<char, TrieNode> Children { get; } = new Dictionary<char, TrieNode>();

view raw Children3.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Above declaration is equivalent to

	private readonly Dictionary<char, TrieNode> _children = new Dictionary<char, TrieNode>();
	public Dictionary<char, TrieNode> Children
	{
	get { return _children; }
	}

view raw Children4.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

That was all it took to make me a happy camper ?.

▬ Takeaway ▬

Auto Property initialization creates a backing field while Expression Bodied property one does not.

The post Expression Bodied Collection Property Initialization Gotcha in C# appeared first on Slight Edge Coder.