How to combine a Partial Class Object in C#?

Question

I defined a class:

public class Sample{
    public string name {get;set;}
    public int price {get;set}
}

Then

 Sample sampleA = new Sample();
 sampleA.name = "test";

  Sample sampleB = new Sample();
  sampleB.price = 100;

I do this because I will save JSONed sampleA and JSONed sampleB to Azure table, to present a full sample object. In other code, sometime only need name, sometime only need price, so I only need to pull data that needed each time. Of course in real code, the structure of the sample is much much more complex.

My question is:, is there any easy method that can do:

  Sample sampleC = sampleA + sampleB;

and sampleC should contain:

 sampleC.name = "test";
  sampleC.price = 100;

Answer 1

How about you just overload the + operator ?

    public static Sample operator +(Sample left, Sample right)
    {
        left.price = right.price;
        return left;
    }

Answer 2

This has actually nothing to do with partial classes. Partial class is a single class, which is "geographically" declared more than in one file.

File1.cs:

public partial class File { public string Prop2 { get;set; } }

File2.cs:

public partial class File { public int Prop1 { get;set; } }

which will, when compiled, produce:

public partial class File 
{
     public string Prop2 { get;set; } 
     public int Prop1 { get;set; } 
}

For what you are asking.
There is no such method, which would combine two different instances into one. You should write it by your own.

UPDATE:
You may ask, why there is no such method. But how would it handle situation like:

Sample sampleA = new Sample();
sampleA.name = "test";
sampleA.price = 200;

Sample sampleB = new Sample();
sampleB.price = 100;

Sample sampleC = sampleA + sampleB; // what would be the value of price here: from sampleA or sampleB?

Answer 3

You could accomplish this by overloading the + operator on your class. Something like this

public static Sample operator +(Sample sampleA, Sample sampleB){
    return new Sample() { Name = sampleA.Name, Price = sampleB.Price };
}

Answer 4

As Eric Yin mentioned in his answer, partial class is an inappropriate name to use as it refers to something else entirely.

It is possible to split the definition of a class or a struct, an interface or a method over two or more source files. Each source file contains a section of the type or method definition, and all parts are combined when the application is compiled.

First of all you should consider whether using the addition operator would be a conceptually good choice. Is it obvious/uambiguous what the resulting object will be?

At first sight, I would interpret the behavior you are looking for as combining two objects by using all their non-null values. When both objects have the same field with a non-null value, how would you handle that?

Considering this is the behavior you are after, you could overload the addition operator as in Gabe's answer. When your class/struct only contains nullable values you could let the addition copy all values from one object to the other where one contains a value and the other a null value. I'd throw an exception when both objects contain a value.

As a last point, reflect on how you ended up with having to implement this behavior. It's my guess there is an underlying design issue you could address instead. You probably shouldn't use objects which only store partial data.

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As another alternative the new dynamic keyword in C# also comes to mind. It might be worthwhile to check that out as well.