Why is Equals called after method has resolved?

Question

I don't know what is calling my Equals method, because when the breakpoint is hit there is no call stack (except the Equals itself and [External Code]).

I have a class UserComplete that has methods GetAll and Equals and some others including a constructor that accepts an array of objects. UserComplete Inherits from User. User class includes methods GetRows and Equals.

Equals is nothing special:

Public Overrides Function Equals(obj As Object) As Boolean
    If Not MyBase.Equals(obj) Then
        Return False
    End If
    Dim u As UserComplete = CType(obj, UserComplete)
    Return Me.RoleIds.Equals(u.RoleIds)
End Function

And GetAll just converts the object()() from the database or cache to a list of UserComplete

Public Function GetAll() As IList(Of UserComplete)
    Dim rows As Object()() = GetRows()
    If IsNothing(rows) Then
        Return Nothing
    End If

    Dim completeUsers As List(Of UserComplete) = (From u In rows Select New UserComplete(DirectCast(u, Object()))).ToList()
    If IsNothing(completeUsers) OrElse Not completeUsers.Any() Then
        Return Nothing
    End If
    Return completeUsers
End Function

I call GetAll from a service controller and actually get a response, no problem. Then after that is complete a breakpoint in Equals is hit, and obj is a List(Of Integers) with one value.

If you would expect this behavior, why? If not, can you explain why it might be occuring and how to fix it?

Gary · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-16 20:00:42Z

0

Ok, I have some information that may count as an answer. However, if someone can explain the "why" of the situation for the community I'll mark that as the answer.

I undid some Parallelism I had to help debug this temporarily (or permanently depending on if I decide this list is going to scale much). I found that the Equals method falls in the call stack under this

Sessions(u.Key) = DateTime.Now

where Sessions is a Dictionary(Of User, DateTime).

So, the simple answer is that when assigning a value to a Dictionary item System.Collections.Generic library calls Equals on each key in the Dictionary.

answered Jan 16, 2017 at 20:00

Gary

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