Sunday, April 24, 2011

Convert object into anonymous type C#

Firstly I want to tell you that to use anonymous types isn't best practice. I was thinking if we can parse anonymous type into object then object should be parsed into anonymous type too.

here's an example.
lets suppose, we create a list of object type and we add some items in it of a anonymous type.

List obj = new List();
obj.Add((object)new {Id=1, Name="S"});
obj.Add((object)new {Id=2, Name="N"});
obj.Add((object)new {Id=3, Name="NS"});



 In the above list, I have added three objects. How can I retrieve the Id and Name attribute. There are two possibilities one we can create a strongly typed class but that will waste the purpose of a Anonymous type and the other one is to use using Generics or Templates. I will create a small method that will convert object into Anonymous type and will be available for querying the data in the code... 
public static T ConvertObjectIntoAnonymousType(T object, T typeOfObject) {         
return (T)object; 
}
 How we will use this function. 
object o = obj[0]; 



var anonymousObject = ConvertObjectIntoAnonymousType(o, new {Id=0, Name=""}); 


Its been converted. What we did? We created a anonymous type in the second argument of the same as we have the list object type. This type will be hold in T of the function ConvertObjectIntoAnonymousType and will be able to cast object into type T that is anonymous type. Using this technique we can save the time to create classes. I used this technique when I was using deserializing the dataset's XML for querying data. Hope this would help to everyone.
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