It is not something you will use on daily bases. It doesn't have good performance. But one day, you will have to use it so it's good to know that it is possible. As you can understand from the title, I'm talking about creating a new type with fields and properties (it can also have methods), create instance/s from it and use it. It will not be 'type safe', of course, and you will be able to use it - read and set its values only with reflection. but, all the DataBindingControls (GridView, FormView etc...) are binding the data using reflection, so they will be happy to bind and use your new created objects from your own type you created on run-time.
Lets cut the crap and jump into the code:
Let's say you got an xml from a webservice. and you want to create an object from it. Something like that:
You receive an xml like this:
<root>
<column name="Name">Miron</column>
<column name="LastName">Abramson</column>
<column name="Blog">www.blog.mironabramson.com</column>
</root>
You want to make a 'match' type that looks like this:
public class MyType
{
public string Name{ get; set; }
public string LastName{ get; set; }
public string Blog{ get; set; }
}
and than create an object from that type and fill it with your data. The prolem is that you don't know what will be the values of the xml attributes and fields. So you need to create the object on run-time:
private object CreateOurNewObject()
{
string _xml = "<root>" +
"<column name=\"Name\">Miron</column>" +
"<column name=\"LastName\">Abramson</column>" +
"<column name=\"Blog\">www.blog.mironabramson.com</column>" +
"</root>";
XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
xmlDoc.LoadXml(_xml);
// create a dynamic assembly and module
AssemblyName assemblyName = new AssemblyName();
assemblyName.Name = "tmpAssembly";
AssemblyBuilder assemblyBuilder = Thread.GetDomain().DefineDynamicAssembly(assemblyName, AssemblyBuilderAccess.Run);
ModuleBuilder module = assemblyBuilder.DefineDynamicModule("tmpModule");
// create a new type builder
TypeBuilder typeBuilder = module.DefineType("BindableRowCellCollection", TypeAttributes.Public | TypeAttributes.Class);
// Loop over the attributes that will be used as the properties names in out new type
foreach (XmlNode node in xmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("root").ChildNodes)
{
string propertyName = node.Attributes["name"].Value;
// Generate a private field
FieldBuilder field = typeBuilder.DefineField("_" + propertyName, typeof(string), FieldAttributes.Private);
// Generate a public property
PropertyBuilder property =
typeBuilder.DefineProperty(propertyName,
PropertyAttributes.None,
typeof(string),
new Type[] { typeof(string) });
// The property set and property get methods require a special set of attributes:
MethodAttributes GetSetAttr =
MethodAttributes.Public |
MethodAttributes.HideBySig;
// Define the "get" accessor method for current private field.
MethodBuilder currGetPropMthdBldr =
typeBuilder.DefineMethod("get_value",
GetSetAttr,
typeof(string),
Type.EmptyTypes);
// Intermediate Language stuff...
ILGenerator currGetIL = currGetPropMthdBldr.GetILGenerator();
currGetIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0);
currGetIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldfld, field);
currGetIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ret);
// Define the "set" accessor method for current private field.
MethodBuilder currSetPropMthdBldr =
typeBuilder.DefineMethod("set_value",
GetSetAttr,
null,
new Type[] { typeof(string) });
// Again some Intermediate Language stuff...
ILGenerator currSetIL = currSetPropMthdBldr.GetILGenerator();
currSetIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0);
currSetIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_1);
currSetIL.Emit(OpCodes.Stfld, field);
currSetIL.Emit(OpCodes.Ret);
// Last, we must map the two methods created above to our PropertyBuilder to
// their corresponding behaviors, "get" and "set" respectively.
property.SetGetMethod(currGetPropMthdBldr);
property.SetSetMethod(currSetPropMthdBldr);
}
// Generate our type
Type generetedType = typeBuilder.CreateType();
// Now we have our type. Let's create an instance from it:
object generetedObject = Activator.CreateInstance(generetedType);
// Loop over all the generated properties, and assign the values from our XML:
PropertyInfo[] properties = generetedType.GetProperties();
int propertiesCounter = 0;
// Loop over the values that we will assign to the properties
foreach (XmlNode node in xmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("root").ChildNodes)
{
string value = node.InnerText;
properties[propertiesCounter].SetValue(generetedObject, value, null);
propertiesCounter++;
}
//Yoopy ! Return our new genereted object.
return generetedObject;
}
Mazal Tov!!!
We create our type and instance from it on run-time !!!
In the file bellow, there is full working exmple of the code
MyTypeRunTime.zip (4.15 kb)