Design pattern for loading multiple message types

Question

As I was looking through SO I came across a question about handling multiple message types. My concern is - how do I load such a message in a neat way? I decided to have a s

Answer 1

What you have looks fine. It's unambiguous. If your AlphaMessage and BetaMessage objects are children of Message then instead of creating a new object, just return the object casted.

if (msg.Type == MessageType.Alpha) return msg as AlphaMessage;
else if (msg.Type == MessageType.Beta) return msg as BetaMessage;

Consumer code will have to handle the case where the cast fails (as returns null).