Question

I have a class (A web control) that has a property of type IEnumerable and would like to work with the parameter using LINQ.

Is there any way to cast / convert / invoke via reflection to IEnumerable<T> not knowing the type at compile time?

Method void (IEnumerable source)
{
    var enumerator = source.GetEnumerator();

    if (enumerator.MoveNext())
    {
        var type = enumerator.Current.GetType();
        Method2<type>(source); // this doesn't work! I know!
    }
}

void Method2<T>(IEnumerable<T> source) {}

Answer 1

Does your Method2 really care what type it gets? If not, you could just call Cast<object>():

void Method (IEnumerable source)
{
    Method2(source.Cast<object>());
}

If you definitely need to get the right type, you’ll need to use reflection.

Something like:

MethodInfo method = typeof(MyType).GetMethod("Method2");
MethodInfo generic = method.MakeGenericMethod(type);
generic.Invoke(this, new object[] {source});

It’s not ideal though… in particular, if source isn’t exactly an IEnumerable<type> then the invocation will fail. For instance, if the first element happens to be a string, but source is a List<object>, you’ll have problems.