Is this the proper way to find the subclass of a polymorphic superclass?

Question

I came across polymorphism in the book that I'm reading and decided to do a little experiment. Essentially what I did was to create a base class called Asset and two subclasses that derive from Asset, called Property and Stock. I created instances of these two types and passed them to this function:

public static void PrintAsset(Asset theAsset)
{
    Console.WriteLine(theAsset.name);
    Console.WriteLine(theAsset.GetType().ToString());

    string x;

    if (theAsset.GetType() == typeof(Stock))
    {
        Stock theStock = (Stock)theAsset;
        x = (theStock.numShares * theStock.stockPrice).ToString();
    }
    else
    {
        Property theStock = (Property)theAsset;
        x = (theStock.value).ToString();
    }

    Console.WriteLine(x + "\n");
}

Initially, the method only consisted of the first two lines, and the output shocked me since I would've figured the incoming reference (theAsset) would've been cast to Asset, but .GetType().ToString() surprisingly produced "...Stock" and "...Property" in the Console output.

I'm assuming the fact that they allow you to see the true class of the object being passed to the method for a reason, so doing something like this should be considered acceptable, but I was wondering if perhaps you SO/SE folks might disagree. Is there some unforeseen problem that this causes?

Answer 1

You have to learn a lot about OOP... There is no polymorphism in your code, as this principle is designed to tackle exactly the kind of code you've written.

The code that uses Asset should never branch its logic based on actual derived type (otherwise it would brake Open-Closed Principle), instead classes should use polymorphism to specify differences in logic. Here is simple example based on your code:

public abstract class Asset
{
    public string Name {get; set;}
    public abstract decimal CalculateValue();
    //... other common properties and methods of Asset
}

public class Property : Asset
{
    public decimal Value {get;set;}

    public override decimal CalculateValue()
    {
        return Value;
    }
}

//usage
public static void PrintAsset(Asset theAsset)
{
    Console.WriteLine(theAsset.Name);
    Console.WriteLine(theAsset.GetType().ToString());

    string assetValue = theAsset.CalculateValue().ToString();
    Console.WriteLine(assetValue + "\n");
}