I discovered this quite old thread recently for a C# project and found all the answers very useful. However, there was one aspect that didn't work well for my particular use case - they all put the burden of unsubscribing from an event on the subscriber. I understand that one could make the argument that it's the subscribers job to handle this, however that isn't realistic for my project.
My primary use case for events is for listening to timers to sequence animations (it's a game). In this scenario, I use a lot of anonymous delegates to chain together sequences. Storing a reference to these isn't very practical.
In order to solve this, I've created a wrapper class around an event that lets you subscribe for a single invocation.
internal class EventWrapper<TEventArgs> {
private event EventHandler<TEventArgs> Event;
private readonly HashSet<EventHandler<TEventArgs>> _subscribeOnces;
internal EventWrapper() {
_subscribeOnces = new HashSet<EventHandler<TEventArgs>>();
}
internal void Subscribe(EventHandler<TEventArgs> eventHandler) {
Event += eventHandler;
}
internal void SubscribeOnce(EventHandler<TEventArgs> eventHandler) {
_subscribeOnces.Add(eventHandler);
Event += eventHandler;
}
internal void Unsubscribe(EventHandler<TEventArgs> eventHandler) {
Event -= eventHandler;
}
internal void UnsubscribeAll() {
foreach (EventHandler<TEventArgs> eventHandler in Event?.GetInvocationList()) {
Event -= eventHandler;
}
}
internal void Invoke(Object sender, TEventArgs e) {
Event?.Invoke(sender, e);
if(_subscribeOnces.Count > 0) {
foreach (EventHandler<TEventArgs> eventHandler in _subscribeOnces) {
Event -= eventHandler;
}
_subscribeOnces.Clear();
}
}
internal void Remove() {
UnsubscribeAll();
_subscribeOnces.Clear();
}
}
The side benefit of having this in a class is that you can make it private and expose only the functionality you want. For example, only expose the SubscribeOnce (and not the Subscribe) method.
public class MyClass {
private EventWrapper<MyEventEventArgs> myEvent = new EventWrapper<MyEventEventArgs>();
public void FireMyEvent() {
myEvent.Invoke(this, new MyEventEventArgs(1000, DateTime.Now));
}
public void SubscribeOnce(EventHandler<MyEventEventArgs> eventHandler) {
myEvent.SubscribeOnce(eventHandler);
}
public class MyEventEventArgs : EventArgs {
public int MyInt;
public DateTime MyDateTime;
public MyEventEventArgs(int myInt, DateTime myDateTime) {
MyInt = myInt;
MyDateTime = myDateTime;
}
}
}
The tradeoff here is more overhead for having an instance of this for each event, however in my scenario - this is an acceptable tradeoff to ensure that garbage gets collected efficiently and the code is more maintainable on the subscriber side. Full example here.