Question

I have a table in my database that I use to manage relationships across my application. it’s pretty basic in it’s nature – parentType,parentId, childType, childId… all as ints. I’ve done this setup before, but I did it with a switch/case setup when I had 6 different tables I was trying to link. Now I have 30 tables that I’m trying to do this with and I would like to be able to do this without having to write 30 case entries in my switch command.

Is there a way that I can make reference to a .Net class using a string? I know this isn’t valid (because I’ve tried several variations of this):

Type t = Type.GetType('WebCore.Models.Page'); object page = new t(); 

I know how to get the Type of an object, but how do I use that on the fly to create a new object?

Answer 1

This link should help:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.activator.createinstance

Activator.CreateInstance will create an instance of the specified type.

You could wrap that in a generic method like this:

public T GetInstance<T>(string type) {     return (T)Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(type)); }