Delegates

Delegates are useful in Unity because delegates allow creation of custom event handlers. Event-handlers are methods that are executed when some event has occurred. Since Unity is an Event-driven system, events, event notifications, and event-handlers are used to create dynamic behavior of gameObjects within a game. Spawning prefabs is a common situation where it is useful to be able to create custom events and event-handlers using custom delegates.

[MSDN Definition](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/edzehd2t(v=vs.110): "A delegate is a type that holds a reference to a method. A delegate is declared with a signature that shows the return type and parameters for the methods it references, and can hold references only to methods that match its signature. A delegate is thus equivalent to a type-safe function pointer or a callback. A delegate declaration is sufficient to define a delegate class."

Details:

• A delegate declaration defines a special type of a reference, which means it can hold a memory address of a method.

• A delegate declaration specifies the signature of a function / method

  • return type

  • name

  • input parameter list

public delegate void SomeEventHandler ( ); //delegate declaration

• A delegate instance is declared using the name of the delegate-type

public SomeEventHandler handleEvent;

Delegate Tutorial by Juan Gomez