How to create a Expression.Lambda when a type is not known until runtime?

Question

This is best explained using code. I have a generic class that has a method that returns an integer. Here is a simple version for the purposes of explaining...

public class Gen<T>
{
    public int DoSomething(T instance)
    {
        // Real code does something more interesting!
        return 1;
    }
}

At runtime I use reflection to discover the type of something and then want to create an instance of my Gen class for that specific type. That is easy enough and done like this...

Type fieldType = // This is the type I have discovered
Type genericType = typeof(Gen<>).MakeGenericType(fieldType);
object genericInstance = Activator.CreateInstance(genericType);

I now want to create an Expression that will take as a parameter an instance of the generic type and then calls the DoSomething method of that type. So I want the Expression to effectively perform this...

int answer = genericInstance.DoSomething(instance);

...except I do not have the 'instance' until some point later at runtime and the genericInstance is the generated type as can be seen above. My attempt at creating the Lambda for this is as follows...

MethodInfo mi = genericType.GetMethod("DoSomething", 
                                      BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public);

var p1 = Expression.Parameter(genericType, "generic");
var p2 = Expression.Parameter(fieldType, "instance");

var x = Expression.Lambda<Func<genericType, fieldType, int>>
            (Expression.Call(p1, mi, p2), 
             new[] { p1, p2 }).Compile();

...so that later on I can call it with something like this...

int answer = x(genericInstance, instance);

Of course, you cannot provide Func with instance parameters and so I have no idea how to parameterize the Lambda generation. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I think you would just use the Expression.Lambda that takes the delegate type as a type rather then as a generic, and create your Func on the fly like you are with Gen<> :

MethodInfo mi = genericType.GetMethod("DoSomething",
                                BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public);

var p1 = Expression.Parameter(genericType, "generic");
var p2 = Expression.Parameter(fieldType, "instance");
var func = typeof (Func<,,>);
var genericFunc = func.MakeGenericType(genericType, fieldType, typeof(int));
var x = Expression.Lambda(genericFunc, Expression.Call(p1, mi, p2),
                new[] { p1, p2 }).Compile();

This will return a Delegate rather than a strongly typed Func , but you can of course cast it if needed (and seemingly difficult if you don't know what you are casting to), or dynamically invoke it using DynamicInvoke on it.

int answer = (int) x.DynamicInvoke(genericInstance, instance);

EDIT :

A good idea that does indeed work. Unfortunately the reason I want to use a strongly typed compiled Lambda is performance. Using DynamicInvoke is prettty slow compared to a typed Lambda.

This seems to work without the need of a dynamic invoke.

var p1 = Expression.Parameter(genericType, "generic");
var p2 = Expression.Parameter(fieldType, "instance");
var func = typeof(Func<,,>);
var genericFunc = func.MakeGenericType(genericType, fieldType, typeof(int));
var x = Expression.Lambda(genericFunc, Expression.Call(p1, mi, p2), new[] { p1, p2 });
var invoke = Expression.Invoke(x, Expression.Constant(genericInstance), Expression.Constant(instance));
var answer = Expression.Lambda<Func<int>>(invoke).Compile()();

EDIT 2 :

A greatly simplified version:

Type fieldType = ;// This is the type I have discovered
Type genericType = typeof(Gen<>).MakeGenericType(fieldType);
object genericInstance = Activator.CreateInstance(genericType);
MethodInfo mi = genericType.GetMethod("DoSomething",
                                BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public);
var value = Expression.Constant(instance, fieldType);
var lambda = Expression.Lambda<Func<int>>(Expression.Call(Expression.Constant(genericInstance), mi, value));
var answer = lambda.Compile()();

Answer 2

This answer only applies if you are using .NET 4.0.

If you make genericInstance dynamic instead of object , you can then call the DoSomething method on it directly, and the dynamic language runtime will take care of everything for you.

class Type1 {
    public int DoSomething() { return 1; }
}
class Type2 {
    public int DoSomething() { return 2; }
}

static void TestDynamic() {
    dynamic t1 = Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(Type1));
    int answer1 = t1.DoSomething(); // returns 1

    dynamic t2 = Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(Type2));
    int answer2 = t2.DoSomething(); // returns 2
}

If you need to keep this class structure ( Gen<T> ), then I don't see an easy way around the fact that you don't know the type T at compile time. If you want to call the delegate, you either have to know its full type at compile time, or you need to pass in the parameters as objects.

Using dynamic gets you to hide the complexity of getting the MethodInfo , etc., and gives you excellent performance. The one drawback vs. DynamicInvoke that I see is that I believe you get the initial overhead of resolving the dynamic call once for every call site. The bindings are cached so that they run very fast from the second time onwards if you call it on objects with the same type.

Answer 3

It's better to to accept an object and use convert to a known type.

Here is an example, how to build access to a property by name on unknown depth:

var model = new { A = new { B = 10L } };
string prop = "A.B";
var parameter = Expression.Parameter(typeof(object));
Func<object, long> expr = (Func<object, long>) Expression.Lambda(prop.Split('.').Aggregate<string, Expression>(Expression.Convert(parameter, model.GetType()), Expression.Property), parameter).Compile();
expr(model).Dump();

It avoids extra costs of DynamicInvoke when type of delegate is unknown at compile time.