“Public” nested classes or not

Question

Suppose I have a class \'Application\'. In order to be initialised it takes certain settings in the constructor. Let\'s also assume that the number of settings is so many th

Answer 1

I don't know if this is considered bad design or not, but I've got some search classes I make where a user calls the Run() method, passing in an object that holds search criteria. It then returns a collection of search result objects.

These SearchCriteria and SearchResult classes have no utility outside of using them with the Search class. So I nest them under the Search class to show they go together.

I have to make the nested classes public so the client of the Search class can make the SearchCriteria to pass into the Search class and so they can get the results of the Search.

public class PersonSearch
{
    public PersonSearchCriteria
    {
        string FirstName {get; set;}
        string LastName {get; set;}
    }

    public PersonSearchResult
    {
        string FirstName {get;}
        string MiddleName {get;}
        string LastName {get;}
        string Quest {get;}
        string FavoriteColor {get;}
    }

    public static List Run(PersonSearchCriteria criteria)
    {
        // create a query using the given criteria

        // run the query

        // return the results 
    }
}


public class PersonSearchTester
{
    public void Test()
    {
        PersonSearch.PersonSearchCriteria criteria = new PersonSearch.PersonSearchCriteria();
        criteria.FirstName = "George";
        criteria.LastName  = "Washington";

        List results = 
            PersonSearch.Run(criteria);
    }
}