Question

Edit: Warning – I now realize that the following technique is generally regarded as a bad idea because it creates hidden dependencies for the sake of looking neat.

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I recently discovered that you can use the StackTrace to infer information about the caller of a method.

This enables you to create a seemingly ‘cool’ API whereby you simply invoke a method without bothering to pass any explicit parameters to it, and the method works out what to do based on the StackTrace.

Is this a bad thing to do, and if so, why?

Example:

public class Cache {   public Object CheckCache()   {     Object valueToReturn = null;     string key = GenerateCacheKeyFromMethodPrototype(new StackTrace().GetFrame(1).GetMethod()); //frame 1 contains caller     if(key is in cache) valueToReturn = itemFromCache;      return valueToReturn;      } }  public class Foo {    private static Cache cache = new Cache();    public Blah MethodFoo(param1, param2...)   {     Blah valueToReturn = cache.CheckCache(); //seems cool!     if(valueToReturn == null)     {       valueToReturn = result of some calculation;       //populate cache     }      return valueToReturn;   } } 

I’m sure there are errors in the above pseudocode, but you get my drift.

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Edit: thanks for everyone’s responses.

Answer 1

There’s two reasons why not to do this:

• It’s slow
• It’s creates a brittle solution.

If you wanted to do this, you’d better off using a tool that supports Aspect Oriented Programming, such as Castle’s Dynamic Proxy.