Why is singleton class sealed

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Part 1 - Introduction to Design Patters - Text - Slides
Part 2 - Singleton Design Pattern - Text - Slides

In this tutorial we will discuss

• A quick Recap of Singleton version which we have discussed in the previous session 
• We will focus on why we used Sealed keyword 
• Why we need to seal the singleton class

In our previous video we discussed

• Why we need to create a singleton class and how we can apply singleton design pattern to a class
• We have changed the class to restrict external instantiation by changing the public constructor to private and then we provided a public property to access this class 
• We have proved that adding Private constructor will prevent us instantiating a new class
• We have further sealed down this class to avoid any inheritance

You might be wondering why we need to seal the class when a private constructor is present. 

Let’s first remove the sealed keyword and check that. Let’s create another class called DerivedSingleton and Inherit the singleton class. Let's compile the code and look at that it has thrown an error saying Singleton is inaccessible due to its protection level. This error is because of private constructor.

Now you might be thinking that when a private constructor is restricting the inheritance then why we need to apply sealed keyword to the class. 

Let’s just move this new class inside the Singleton class. By moving this class inside the Singleton class it has now become nested or child class of the main singleton class.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Threading.Tasks;

/// <summary>

/// First Singleton version

/// </summary>

namespace SingletonDemo

{

    /*

     *  Sealed restricts the inheritance

     */

    public class Singleton

    {

        private static int counter = 0;

        private static object obj = new object();

        /*

        * Private constructor ensures that object is not

        * instantiated other than with in the class itself

        */

        private Singleton()

        {

            counter++;

            Console.WriteLine("Counter Value " + counter.ToString());

        }

        private static Singleton instance = null;

        /*

         * public property is used to return only one instance of the class

         * leveraging on the private property

         */

        public static Singleton GetInstance

        {

            get

            {

                if (instance == null)

                    instance = new Singleton();

                return instance;

            }

        }

        /*

         * Public method which can be invoked through the singleton instance

         */

        public void PrintDetails(string message)

        {

            Console.WriteLine(message);

        }

        /*

         * By removing sealed keyword we can inherit the singleton and instantiate multiple objects

         * This violates singleton design principles.

         */

        public class DerivedSingleton : Singleton

        {

        }

    }

}

What is a nested class? 
A class with in another class is called a nested class. 

Now that we have moved the derived class to nested class lets compile the program and check. Look at that we are able to compile this successfully. 

Now, let’s switch to main program and access the nested class.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.Threading.Tasks;

/// <summary>

/// First version of Singleton demo

/// </summary>

namespace SingletonDemo

{

    class Program

    {

        static void Main(string[] args)

        {

            /*

            * Assuming Singleton is created from student class

            * we refer to the GetInstance property from the Singleton class

            */

            Singleton fromStudent = Singleton.GetInstance;

            fromStudent.PrintDetails("From Student");

            /*

            * Assuming Singleton is created from employee class

            * we refer to the GetInstance property from the Singleton class

            */

            Singleton fromEmployee = Singleton.GetInstance;

            fromEmployee.PrintDetails("From Employee");

            Console.WriteLine("-------------------------------------");

            /*

             * Instantiating singleton from a derived class. This violates singleton pattern principles.

             */

            Singleton.DerivedSingleton derivedObj = new Singleton.DerivedSingleton();

            derivedObj.PrintDetails("From Derived");

          

            Console.ReadLine();

        }

    }

}

Lets run the program. Look at that the counter value has incremented to 2 proving that we are able to create multiple instances of the singleton using the nested derived class.

This violates the principle of singleton.  Let’s go back to the Singleton and make the class as sealed. Let’s compile the program

Look at that we have got an error when we compile the program saying we cannot derive a sealed class. With this we have proved that private constructor helps in preventing any external instantiations of objects and sealed will prevent the class inheritances.

In the next session we will discuss how to handle thread safety in singleton as the current version can create multiple instances in multi-threaded environments.