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[C# 4.0] Implementing a custom dynamic object

October 08, 2009

If you’ve been following the news about .NET, you probably know that the upcoming version 4.0 of C# introduces a new dynamic type. This type allows to access members of an object which are not statically known (at compile time). These members will be resolved at runtime, thanks to the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime). This feature makes it easier to manipulate COM objects, or any object which type is not statically known. You can find more information about the dynamic type on MSDN.

While playing with Visual Studio 2010 beta, I realized this dynamic type enabled very interesting scenarios… It is indeed possible to create your own dynamic objects, with the ability to control the resolution of dynamic members. To do that, you need to implement the IDynamicMetaObjectProvider interface. This interface seems pretty simple at first sight, since it only defines one member: the GetMetaObject method. But it actually gets trickier when you try to implement this method : you have to build a DynamicMetaObject from an Expression, which is far from trivial… I must admit I almost gave up when I saw the complexity of the task.

Fortunately, there is a much easier way to create your own dynamic objects: you just have to inherit from the DynamicObject class, which provides a basic implementation of IDynamicMetaObjectProvider, and override a few methods to achieve the desired behavior.

Here’s a simple example, inspired from the Javascript language. In Javascript, it is possible to dynamically add members (properties or methods) to an existing type, as in the following sample:

var x = new Object();
x.Message = "Hello world !";
x.ShowMessage = function()
{
  alert(this.Message);
};
x.ShowMessage();

This code creates an object, add a Message property to that object by defining its value, and also adds a ShowMessage method to display the message.

In previous versions of C#, it would have been impossible to do such a thing: indeed C# is a statically typed language, which implies that members are resolved at compile time, not at runtime. Since the Object class doesn’t have a Message property or a ShowMessage method, the compiler won’t accept things like x.Message or x.ShowMessage(). This is where the dynamic type comes to the rescue, since it doesn’t resolve the members at compile time…

Now let’s try to create a dynamic object that allows to write a C# code similar to the Javascript code above. To do that, we will store the values of dynamic properties in a Dictionary<string, object>. To make this class work, we need to override the TryGetMember and TrySetMember methods. These methods implement the logic to read or write a member of the dynamic object. To illustrate the idea, let’s have a look at the code, I’ll comment it later:

public class MyDynamicObject : DynamicObject
{
    private Dictionary<string, object> _properties = new Dictionary<string, object>();

    public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result)
    {
        return _properties.TryGetValue(binder.Name, out result);
    }

    public override bool TrySetMember(SetMemberBinder binder, object value)
    {
        _properties[binder.Name] = value;
        return true;
    }
}

Now let’s explain the code above. The TryGetMember tries to find the requested property in the dictionary. Note that the name of the property is exposed as the Name property of the binder parameter. If the property exists, its value is returned in the result output parameter, and the method returns true. Otherwise, the method returns false, which will cause a RuntimeBinderException at the call site. This exception simply means that the dynamic resolution of the property failed.

The TrySetMember method performs the opposite task: it defines the value of a property. If the member doesn’t exist, it is added to the dictionary, so the method always returns true.

The following sample shows how to use this object:

dynamic x = new MyDynamicObject();
x.Message = "Hello world !";
Console.WriteLine(x.Message);

This code compiles and runs fine, and prints “Hello world !” to the console… easy, isn’t it ?

But what about methods ? Well, I could tell you that you need to override the TryInvokeMember method, which is used to handle dynamic method calls… but actually it’s not even necessary ! Our implementation already handles this feature: we just need to assign a delegate to a property of the object. It won’t actually be a real member method, just a property returning a delegate, but since the syntax to call it will be the same as a method call, it will do fine for now. Here’s an example of adding a method to the object:

dynamic x = new MyDynamicObject();
x.Message = "Hello world !";
x.ShowMessage = new Action(
    () =>
    {
        Console.WriteLine(x.Message);
    });
x.ShowMessage();

Eventually, we end up with something very close to the Javascript we were trying to imitate, all with a class of less than 10 lines of code (not counting the braces)…

This class can be quite handy to use as an general purpose object, for instance to group some data together without having to create a specific class. In that aspect, it’s similar to an anonymous type (already existing in C# 3), but with the benefit that it can be used as a method return value, which is not possible with an anonymous type.

Of course there are many more useful things to do with a custom dynamic object… for instance, here’s a simple wrapper for a DataRow, to make it easier to access the fields:

public class DynamicDataRow : DynamicObject
{
    private DataRow _dataRow;

    public DynamicDataRow(DataRow dataRow)
    {
        if (dataRow == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException("dataRow");
        this._dataRow = dataRow;
    }

    public DataRow DataRow
    {
        get { return _dataRow; }
    }

    public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result)
    {
        result = null;
        if (_dataRow.Table.Columns.Contains(binder.Name))
        {
            result = _dataRow[binder.Name];
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }

    public override bool TrySetMember(SetMemberBinder binder, object value)
    {
        if (_dataRow.Table.Columns.Contains(binder.Name))
        {
            _dataRow[binder.Name] = value;
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
}

Let’s add a helper extension method to get the wrapper for a row:

public static class DynamicDataRowExtensions
{
    public static dynamic AsDynamic(this DataRow dataRow)
    {
        return new DynamicDataRow(dataRow);
    }
}

We can now write things like that:

DataTable table = new DataTable();
table.Columns.Add("FirstName", typeof(string));
table.Columns.Add("LastName", typeof(string));
table.Columns.Add("DateOfBirth", typeof(DateTime));

dynamic row = table.NewRow().AsDynamic();
row.FirstName = "John";
row.LastName = "Doe";
row.DateOfBirth = new DateTime(1981, 9, 12);
table.Rows.Add(row.DataRow);

// Add more rows...
// ...

var bornInThe20thCentury = from r in table.AsEnumerable()
                           let dr = r.AsDynamic()
                           where dr.DateOfBirth.Year > 1900
                           && dr.DateOfBirth.Year <= 2000
                           select new { dr.LastName, dr.FirstName };

foreach (var item in bornInThe20thCentury)
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0} {1}", item.FirstName, item.LastName);
}

Now that you understand the basic principles for creating custom dynamic objects, you can imagine many more useful applications :)

Update : Just after posting this article, I stumbled upon the ExpandoObject class, which does exactly the same thing as the MyDynamicObject class above… It seems I reinvented the wheel again ;). Anyway, it’s interesting to see how dynamic objects work internally, if only for learning purposes… For more details about the ExpandoObject class, check out this post on the C# FAQ blog.