Question

currently we have quite a chunky auditing system for objects within our application, the flow goes like this..

-Class implements an interface

-Interfaces forces the class to override some methods for adding properties that need auditing to a List of KeyValuePairs

-Class is then also needs to recreate the objects state from a list of key value pairs

Now the developer needs to add all this to there class, also our objects change quite often so we didn’t just serialise the class.

What I would like to do is to use attributes to mark the properties as auditable and then do everything automatically so the developer doesn’t really need to do anything.

My Main question is – I know people always say reflection is slow, how slow are we talking? what performance hits am I going to get from looking through the class and looking at attributes against a property and then doing any required logic?

thanks for any help

Ste,

Answer 1

It’s hard to give a specific answer because it depends on what adequate performance is for your application.

Reflection is slower then normal compiled code but when worrying about performance problems it’s always better to have something that works and then use profiling to find the real performance bottleneck and optimize.

Premature optimization could lead to code that’s much harder to maintain so your developers will be less productive.

I would start with using reflection and write a good set of unit tests so you know your code is working. If performance turns out to be a problem you can use the Visual Studio profiler to profile your unit tests and discover the bottlenecks.

There are some libraries that can speed up reflection or you could use Expression trees to replace your reflection code if it’s to slow.