Is there a way to use the same method to read both an SPListItem object and SPListItemVersion object

Question

I'm using SP2010 Server with C# for development.

I'm currently writing a method that will read a couple of values from each version in a document's history. Ideally I'd like to use the same method but I ran into two issues:

1) I haven't found a way to have the flexibility to pass in either a SPListItem or SPListItemVersion.

This works: getFieldValue(My_SPListItemVersion)

This does not work: getFieldValue(My_SPListItem)

public static void getFieldValue(SPListItemVersion liVersion)
{  
   Console.WriteLine(field.GetFieldValueAsText(liVersion["field1"]));
   Console.WriteLine(field.GetFieldValueAsText(liVersion["field2"]));
   Console.WriteLine(field.GetFieldValueAsText(liVersion["field3"]));
}

2) When I iterate through the version history I can't retrieve the most recent version.

Question
Is there anyway around either one of these or should I stick to writing two methods. One for SPListItem and another for SPListItemVersion.

Answer 1

It depends on what you want the function to do in the two cases. When called with a SPListItem, if you want it to display the values from the most recent version then one option would be to put all the logic into a function that accepts a SPListItemVersion. If the function was passed a SPListItem then it would just call the function with it's most recent SPListItemVersion.

private void getFieldValue(SPListItem liItem)
{
    //Add in error check to make sure versioning is enabled
    getFieldValue(liItem.Versions[0]);
}

//All the logic goes into this 
public static void getFieldValue(SPListItemVersion liVersion)
{  
   Console.WriteLine(field.GetFieldValueAsText(liVersion["field1"]));
   Console.WriteLine(field.GetFieldValueAsText(liVersion["field2"]));
   Console.WriteLine(field.GetFieldValueAsText(liVersion["field3"]));
}

This should allow you to call the function with either type of parameter and get the expected result.