I'm looking for a way to add members dynamically to an dynamic object. OK, I guess a little clarification is needed...
When you do that :
dynamic foo = new ExpandoObject();
foo.Bar = 42;
The Bar
property will be added dynamically at runtime. But the code still refers "statically" to Bar (the name "Bar" is hard-coded)... What if I want to add a property at runtime without knowing its name at compile time ?
I know how to do this with a custom dynamic object (I actually blogged about it a few months ago), using the methods of the DynamicObject
class, but how can I do it with any dynamic object ?
I could probably use the IDynamicMetaObjectProvider
interface, but I don't understand how to use it. For instance, what argument should I pass to the GetMetaObject
method ? (it expects an Expression
)
And by the way, how do you perform reflection on dynamic objects ? "Regular" reflection and TypeDescriptor
don't show the dynamic members...
Any insight would be appreciated !
What you want is similar to Python's getattr/setattr functions. There's no built in equivalent way to do this in C# or VB.NET. The outer layer of the DLR (which ships w/ IronPython and IronRuby in Microsoft.Scripting.dll) includes a set of hosting APIs which includes an ObjectOperations API that has GetMember/SetMember methods. You could use those but you'd need the extra dependency of the DLR and a DLR based language.
Probably the simplest approach would be to create a CallSite w/ one of the existing C# binders. You can get the code for this by looking at the result of "foo.Bar = 42" in ildasm or reflector. But a simple example of this would be:
object x = new ExpandoObject();
CallSite<Func<CallSite, object, object, object>> site = CallSite<Func<CallSite, object, object, object>>.Create(
Binder.SetMember(
Microsoft.CSharp.RuntimeBinder.CSharpBinderFlags.None,
"Foo",
null,
new[] { CSharpArgumentInfo.Create(CSharpArgumentInfoFlags.None, null) }
)
);
site.Target(site, x, 42);
Console.WriteLine(((dynamic)x).Foo);
ExpandoObject implements IDictionary<string,object> albeit explicitly. What this means is that you can simply cast the ExpandoObject to IDictionary<string,object> and manipulate the dictionary.
dynamic foo = new ExpandoObject();
foo.Bar = 42;
food = (IDictionary<string,object>)foo;
food["Baz"] = 54
The opensource framework Dynamitey will do this (available via nuget). It encapsulates while still caching the call site and binder code that @Dino-Viehland used.
Dynamic.InvokeSet(foo,"Bar",42);
It can also call many other kinds of c# binder too.
I know this is quite an old post, but I thought I'd pass along Miron Abramson solution on how you can create your own type and add properties at runtime -- in case anyone else out there is looking for something similar.