Can abstract class be a parameter in a controller's action?

Question

I have an Action function inside of a Controller, which is being called with AJAX. That Action is taking in 1 parameter. Client side, I construct a JSON object which shoul

Answer 1

You will have to create a child class of the abstract class and pass that instead. Abstract classes are fundamentally not permitted to be instantiated by themselves. However, if you have a C# method like:

protected void Foo(MyAbstractClass param1)

...then you can still pass Foo an instance of a type that derives from MyAbstractClass. So you can create a concrete child class MyChildClass : MyAbstractClass and pass that to your method, and it should still work. You won't have to change the Foo method, but you will need some access to the C# code so you can create MyChildClass.

If you're working with generics -- for example, if your method signature is:

protected void Foo(IEnumerable param1)

...then it becomes more complicated, and you'll want to look into covariance and contravariance in C# generics.