I have an application that receives a number of values that need to be applied to various properties of an object (sealed class). Originally I just set the value without checking anything and updated the object, but of course sometimes the new values wouldn’t be valid, and other times they would be identical to existing values, so running an update was a waste of system resources, and frankly a rather slow process.

To get around this, I’ve created a private bool that is set to true if/when a new value is applied, which is determined with a method that checks if the value is different (and valid):

private bool updated = false; private bool updateValue(string property, string value, bool allowNulls = false) {     if ((allowNulls || !string.IsNullOrEmpty(value)) && !property.Equals(value)) { updated = true;  return true; }     return false; } 

Then, whenever I need to set the value of a property to something new, I have a single If Statement:

if (updateValue(obj.property, newValue)) { obj.property = newValue; } 

And then of course, when all properties have been assigned their new values:

if (updated) { obj.commitChanges(); } 

So, 1) Is there a better way of doing this, and 2) is there a more concise way to run my If statement? Single-line If clauses like this annoy me; it seems like I should be able to say “Set A to B when C”.