WinForms Assoicating a variable with a control - winforms

Question

I've just written a program in win forms and c# that replicates the game "Yahtzee". Although, my code did the job, and the game worked well. I felt like the code was really sloppy. The main part that bugged me was that I had five buttons on my form, that represented each yahtzee dice. when you click on a dice it means you wanted to save that dice for the next roll. so I had five different variables that stored whether the dice is saved or not (bool save1, save2, save3, save4, save5). I ended up having to use if and else if statements to decide what save button was going to be changed. I would like to know a way to somehow associate the cooresponding variable to each button so the code is much more consice and easy to read. This is similar to the code I was using, where the function below is called when either dice is clicked.
dice_clicked(object sender, EventArgs e){
if (sender == dice1){
save1 = true;
}else if (sender == dice2){
save2 = true;
}else if (sender == dice3){
save3 = true;
}else if (sender == dice4){
save4 = true;
}else if (sender == dice5){
save5 = true;
}
}

Answer 1

You could use a Dictionary, with the Button as the Key,
and the Boolean as the Value; then you get/set the value using the
"sender" parameter in the click handler. – Idle_Mind 19 hours ago
#Idle_Mind This seems like a great idea, could you maybe write some code, so that I can understand it better – cj32 22 mins ago
Here's some example code to play with using the Dictionary approach:
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
private Dictionary<Button, bool> saveBtn = new Dictionary<Button, bool>();
private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// add initial entries and set them to false
saveBtn.Add(dice1, false);
saveBtn.Add(dice2, false);
saveBtn.Add(dice3, false);
saveBtn.Add(dice4, false);
saveBtn.Add(dice5, false);
}
private void dice_clicked(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Button sourceBtn = (Button)sender;
saveBtn[sourceBtn] = true; // set save state to true for that button
// example code to reset all values to false:
foreach(KeyValuePair<Button, bool> kvp in saveBtn)
{
saveBtn[kvp.Key] = false;
}
// example to find all the buttons that have been saved:
foreach (KeyValuePair<Button, bool> kvp in saveBtn)
{
if (kvp.Value)
{
Button btn = kvp.Key;
// do something with "btn"
btn.BackColor = Color.Red;
}
}
// is dice3 saved?
if (saveBtn[dice3])
{
Console.WriteLine("dice3 was saved");
}
}
}

Answer 2

You could store the dice number in the Tag property of the buttons and use an array for the save states
bool[] save = new bool[5]; // Index range 0 to 4.
dice_clicked(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
int diceNo = Int32.Parse(((Button)sender).Tag);
save[diceNo - 1] = true;
}
If you numbered the dice and buttons starting with 0 instead of 1, the indexes and the numbers would match. Array indexes are always 0-based.