[Mono-list] General .NET Q

[Chris List Recipient]

Check this out for a completed solution:

http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/DotNetScript.asp?target=execute%7Cc%23%7Cc
ode

-Chris 

-----Original Message-----
From: mono-list-admin@lists.ximian.com
[mailto:mono-list-admin@lists.ximian.com] On Behalf Of Jonathan Pryor
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 7:15 PM
To: svose@programmerforrent.com
Cc: mono
Subject: Re: [Mono-list] General .NET Q

Below...

On Wed, 2004-03-24 at 21:05, Shawn Vose wrote:
> Does anyone know if the following is possible:
> 
> Taking a snippet of .NET c# code, maybe a function, and storing it in 
> a mysql db
> 
> to be later called by another piece of code and executed?
> 
> I was asked this question by a client and I dont have the slightest 
> clue on how to answer this. My initial answer is no because it would 
> have to be compiled into the calling class; however, I am thinking 
> that system.reflection would be able to help me.

Is it possible?  Yes.  Will System.Reflection do it?  It depends.  It can't
do it alone, though.

The easiest thing to do would be to:
1.  Define an interface
2.  Use System.CodeDom to (a) generate skeleton C# code, (b) include the
    code from the database into the CodeDom code, and (c) compile the
    code into an assembly.  The CodeDom code should implement the 
    interface defined in (1).
3.  Load the assembly at runtime
4.  Instantiate the type from the assembly at runtime, through the 
    numerous mechanisms .NET provides (Activator.CreateInstance, etc.) 5.
Cast the type created in (4) to the interface defined in (1) 6.  Invoke the
code via the interface method.

A Variation would be to use a delegate instead of the interface.

A pitfall with this framework is that all methods defined in the database
must conform to a single interface, so you couldn't have methods with
different argument lists and return types defined this way.

To work around that, you could use System.Reflection.MethodInfo, but this
complicates your client code as you need not only need to know what function
to call, but also what arguments to provide it, what it returns, etc.  This
can be done, it's just not as simple or as fast as the above solution.

(Regarding performance, CodeDom generation will be slow, but it can't be
avoided.  Method invocation also can't be avoided, but delegate/interface
invocation is *much* faster than MethodInfo.Invoke, so if this code will be
invoked frequently, a well-defined delegate/interface would be preferred.)

 - Jon


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