I answered a pretty interesting question on Stack Overflow yesterday, creating a method that takes a string and returns the value converted to the 'best-fitting' type out of a set of types boxed in dynamic. Here is the full question:
I have been playing around with converting a string to a value type in .NET, where the resulting value type is unknown. The problem I have encountered in my code is that I need a method which accepts a string, and uses a "best fit" approach to populate the resulting value type. Should the mechanism not find a suitable match, the string is returned.
This is what I have come up with:
public static dynamic ConvertToType(string value) { Type[] types = new Type[] { typeof(System.SByte), typeof(System.Byte), typeof(System.Int16), typeof(System.UInt16), typeof(System.Int32), typeof(System.UInt32), typeof(System.Int64), typeof(System.UInt64), typeof(System.Single), typeof(System.Double), typeof(System.Decimal), typeof(System.DateTime), typeof(System.Guid) }; foreach (Type type in types) { try { return Convert.ChangeType(value, type); } catch (Exception) { continue; } } return value; }I feel that this approach is probably not best practice because it can only match against the predefined types.
Usually I have found that .NET accommodates this functionality in a better way than my implementation, so my question is: are there any better approaches to this problem and/or is this functionality implemented better in .NET?
It's an Interesting idea but the code above has one major flaw, if value happens to be some GUID then the method will throw 12 exceptions before returning the string converted to a System.GUID boxed in dynamic. Immediately I thought awesome, another opportunity to use reflection! :)
Each of the types contain a static method TryParse which takes a string as the first argument and out T where T is the type as the second parameter. We can use this to our advantage by extracting the method using reflection.
var obj = Activator.CreateInstance(type);
var methodParameterTypes = new Type[] { typeof(string), type.MakeByRefType() };
var method = type.GetMethod("TryParse", methodParameterTypes);
var methodParameters = new object[] { value, obj };
method can now be Invoked which will return a bool showing whether the parse was successful. If so the value will be in methodParameters[1].
bool success = (bool)method.Invoke(null, methodParameters);
if (success)
{
return methodParameters[1];
}
I made a couple of other improvements, namely making the method an extension method on string and pulling the Type[] array out into a static property with lazy loading. I figure if this method is invoked once it will probably be many times. We could even go a step further and cache the methods for each Type as well. Below is the solution I provided, see my full answer here.
public static class StringExtensions
{
public static dynamic ConvertToType(this string value)
{
foreach (Type type in ConvertibleTypes)
{
var obj = Activator.CreateInstance(type);
var methodParameterTypes =
new Type[] { typeof(string), type.MakeByRefType() };
var method = type.GetMethod("TryParse", methodParameterTypes);
var methodParameters = new object[] { value, obj };
bool success = (bool)method.Invoke(null, methodParameters);
if (success)
{
return methodParameters[1];
}
}
return value;
}
private static Type[] _convertibleTypes = null;
private static Type[] ConvertibleTypes
{
get
{
if (_convertibleTypes == null)
{
_convertibleTypes = new Type[]
{
typeof(System.SByte),
typeof(System.Byte),
typeof(System.Int16),
typeof(System.UInt16),
typeof(System.Int32),
typeof(System.UInt32),
typeof(System.Int64),
typeof(System.UInt64),
typeof(System.Single),
typeof(System.Double),
typeof(System.Decimal),
typeof(System.DateTime),
typeof(System.Guid)
};
}
return _convertibleTypes;
}
}
}