Question

First of all, sorry if this has been asked before. I’ve done a pretty comprehensive search and found nothing quite like it, but I may have missed something.

And now to the question: I’m trying to invoke a constructor through reflection, with no luck. Basically, I have an object that I want to clone, so I look up the copy constructor for its type and then want to invoke it. Here’s what I have:

public Object clone(Object toClone) {
     MethodBase copyConstructor = type.GetConstructor(
         new Type[] { toClone.GetType() });
     return method.Invoke(toClone, new object[] { toClone }); //<-- doesn't work
}

I call the above method like so:

List<int> list = new List<int>(new int[] { 0, 1, 2 });
List<int> clone = (List<int>) clone(list);

Now, notice the invoke method I’m using is MethodBase‘s invoke. ConstructorInfo provides an invoke method that does work if invoked like this:

return ((ConstructorInfo) method).Invoke(new object[] { toClone });

However, I want to use MethodBase‘s method, because in reality instead of looking up the copy constructor every time I will store it in a dictionary, and the dictionary contains both methods and constructors, so it’s a Dictionary<MethodBase>, not Dictionary<ConstructorInfo>.
I could of course cast to ConstructorInfo as I do above, but I’d rather avoid the casting and use the MethodBase method directly. I just can’t figure out the right parameters.

Any help? Thanks so much.

---

EDIT

Benjamin,
Thanks so much for your suggestions. I was actually doing exactly what you suggest in your second edit, except (and that’s a big “except”) my dictionary was where

class ClonerMethod {

    public MethodBase method;
    public bool isConstructor;

    ...

    public Object invoke(Object toClone) {
        return isConstructor ?
            ((ConstructorInfo) method).Invoke(new object[] { toClone }) : //<-- I wanted to avoid this cast
            method.Invoke(toClone, null);
    }

}

And then I called ClonerMethod‘s invoke on what I found in the dictionary. I didn’t add the code the deals with all that because the answer I was looking for was just how to call Invoke on a ConstructorInfo using MethodBase‘s Invoke method, so I didn’t want to add unnecessary info and too much code for you guys to read through. However, I like your use of Func<,> much MUCH better, so I’m switching to that. Also making the Clone method generic is a nice addition, but in my case the caller doesn’t know the type of the object, so I’ll keep it non-generic instead.

I didn’t know about Func<,>, and if I knew about the lambda operator I had forgotten (I hadn’t really needed something like this before), so I’ve actually learnt a lot from your answer. I always love to learn new things, and this will come in very handy in the future, so thanks a lot! 🙂

Answer 1

If you know that the object is having a constructor like that, did you think about using this overload of Activator.CreateInstance instead?

---

Update: So you have a cascading search for MethodInfo/MethodBase already and store them -> You don’t want/cannot use Activator.

In that case I don’t see a way to do what you want without a cast. But – maybe you could change the architecture to store a Dictionary<Type, Func<object, object>> and add those Func<> instances instead. Makes the calling code nicer (I assume) and would allow you to do this cast once:

// Constructor
dictionary.Add(type,
  source => ((ConstructorInfo) method).Invoke(new object[] {source})
);

// Clone
dictionary.Add(type,
  source => method.Invoke(source, new object[]{})
);

In fact, since you only care about the difference between constructor and normal method at the very site where you grab them, you wouldn’t need a cast at all, would you?

// Constructor 2
dictionary.Add(type,
  source => yourConstructorInfo.Invoke(new object[] {source})
);

Unless I’m missing something (quite possible, of course) this could resolve the problem by doing this once on the defining side of the fence and the caller wouldn’t need to mind if this is constructor or not?

---

One last time, then I’m going to stop the edit spam. I was bored and came up with the following code. Is that what you are trying to accomplish?

public class Cloner {
    private readonly IDictionary<Type, Func<object, object>> _cloneMap =
            new Dictionary<Type, Func<object, object>>();

    public T Clone<T>(T source) {
        Type sourceType = source.GetType();
        Func<object, object> cloneFunc;

        if (_cloneMap.TryGetValue(sourceType, out cloneFunc)) {
            return (T)cloneFunc(source);
        }

        if (TryGetCopyConstructorCloneFunc(sourceType, out cloneFunc)) {
            _cloneMap.Add(sourceType, cloneFunc);
            return (T)cloneFunc(source);
        }

        if (TryGetICloneableCloneFunc(sourceType, out cloneFunc)) {
            _cloneMap.Add(sourceType, cloneFunc);
            return (T)cloneFunc(source);
        }

        return default(T);
    }

    private bool TryGetCopyConstructorCloneFunc(Type type, 
                    out Func<object, object> cloneFunc) {
        var constructor = type.GetConstructor(new[] { type });
        if (constructor == null) {
            cloneFunc = source => null;
            return false;
        }
        cloneFunc = source => constructor.Invoke(new[] { source });
        return true;
    }

    private bool TryGetICloneableCloneFunc(Type type,
                    out Func<object, object> cloneFunc) {
        bool isICloneable = typeof(ICloneable).IsAssignableFrom(type);
        var cloneMethod = type.GetMethod("Clone", new Type[] { });
        if (!isICloneable || (cloneMethod == null)) {
            cloneFunc = source => null;
            return false;
        }
        cloneFunc = source => cloneMethod.Invoke(source, new object[] {});
        return true;
    }
}