How to Clone Objects

Question

When I do the following.. anything done to Person b modifies Person a (I thought doing this would clone Person b from Person a). I also have NO idea if changing Person a wil

Answer 1

Painlessly: Using NClone library

Person a = new Person() { head = "big", feet = "small" };
Person b = Clone.ObjectGraph(a); 

Answer 2

It couldn't be simpler than this:

    public SomeClass Clone () {

        var clonedJson = JsonConvert.SerializeObject (this);

        return JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<SomeClass> (clonedJson);
    }

Just serialize any object to a JSON string and then deserialize it. This will do a deep copy...

Answer 3

You could do it like this:

var jss = new JavaScriptSerializer();
var b = jss.Deserialize<Person>(jss.Serialize(a));

For deep cloning you may want to take a look at this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/78612/550975

Answer 4

a and b are just two references to the same Person object. They both essentially hold the address of the Person.

There is a ICloneable interface, though relatively few classes support it. With this, you would write:

Person b = a.Clone();

Then, b would be an entirely separate Person.

You could also implement a copy constructor:

public Person(Person src)
{
  // ... 
}

There is no built-in way to copy all the fields. You can do it through reflection, but there would be a performance penalty.

Answer 5

This happens because "Person" is a class, so it is passed by reference. In the statement "b = a" you are just copying a reference to the one and only "Person" instance that you created with the keyword new.

The easiest way to have the behavior that you are looking for is to use a "value type".

Just change the Person declaration from

class Person

to

struct Person

Answer 6

Since the MemberwiseClone() method is not public, I created this simple extension method in order to make it easier to clone objects:

public static T Clone<T>(this T obj)
{
    var inst = obj.GetType().GetMethod("MemberwiseClone", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic);

    return (T)inst?.Invoke(obj, null);
}

Usage:

var clone = myObject.Clone();