Is there a way to convert C# code to JSON

Question

is there a way to convert C# code to any block representation and back? Something like this:

int foo(int a){return a+1;}

to

{function:{name:"foo", return:"int", args:[{type:"int", name:"a"}], operations:[{type:"return", operations:[{type:"add", args:[{type:"vairable", value:"a"},{type:"const", value: 1}]}]}]}}

Does not have to be JSON, but I need it to be split to smallest parts.

UPDATE:

Lets say I generate a function that fills a structure based on a data from database:

public Person GetPerson(int id)
{
  try {    // <-- entire block added by user
    using (var query = db.GetPerson(id))
    {
      return new Person(){
        /*0*/name = query['name'],    // /*#*/ is my mark of generated line
        /*1*/age = query['age']
      };
    }
  }
  ...
}

Assume that a user changed the line: /*1*/age = query['age'] to /*1*/age = 10 - query['age'] for some reason. Now the database column age is changed to years. The new line should be /*1*/years = 10 - query['years'] . The problem is that I need to keep the 10 - entered by the user.

If I had this code is JSON (or any graph) I could find the part that needs to be changed and only affect the nodes I genereated before keeping the excess.

This exmaple is trivial, but it can get complicated very quickly. Especially with quotes and brackets. This is the only approach I can see to work right now. Just hoped that tools for it already exists.

Answer 1

Is there a way to convert C# code to JSON

Sure. You can either make your json contain a string with your c# code and use runtime code generation to execute it, or encode dlls as base64 data and put it into your json. If you want to dig deeper you could probably extract the CIL code and make some custom JSON encoding of it. There are also expression trees, but I only think they allow encoding of expressions , not arbitrary code.

But in any case it is probably not a good idea to let the user customize code at that level. If you want to allow customization you should probably go for an actual plugin architecture. Or if you just want some customization of some simple mathematical expression, just store it as a string and write a simple parser to validate & evaluate it.