Handling different types of async socket received data on service

Question

I have a service that will handle an async socket. I will have several different request types that will be received by this service, but I want to avoid having any sort of switch statement to decide how to handle the received data.

Right now, I have a request object that will contain sender info, request type, and a generic object that will contain info that has to do with the request.

Ex: Login request will be sent with a Name/password hash.

The only way I can think to handle these once they've been reconstructed is to have a large switch statement that says

if (requestType = 0)
     HandleLogin(receivedData);
else if (requestType = 1)
     HandleDataRequest(receivedData);

I thought of abstraction but I would think since the classes need to be shared by the client/server in order to be serialized and deserialized, the client would have the server logic on it's class as well.

class LoginRequest : Request
{
     public override void HandleRequest()
     {
          // Server logic here. But then client 
          // would have this useless logic in it's library.
     }
}

If someone could point me in the right direction I would appreciate it!

Answer 1

If you are using C# 4.0+, and if your complete set of request types is known at compile time (which is sounds to be), you can use the dynamic keyword and method overloading to avoid using a switch statement.

First, create a version of the handle method for each type of request.

void HandleRequest(LoginRequest request)
{

}

void HandleRequest(DataRequest request)
{

}

Then, create a dynamically typed instance of your request data and use it to call your overloaded method.

dynamic request = receivedData;
HandleRequest(request);