I have a table in my SQL Server DB that holds auditing information for certain actions a user takes within my system. Things like who performed the action, when it was performed, and what action are all pieces of information that can easily span multiple actions. But depending on the action performed, there may be other information that I want to capture, that is specific to the action. To handle this, I elected to add an “XML Metadata” column to the table that holds serialized XML of different metadata objects that I’ve created. I created a metadata object for each of the actions that I’m interested in tracking extra for. So each object is responsible for tracking specific extra information (metadata) for it’s action. The objects are serialized and written to my new column.
I have SystemAction objects that I use to store information from this table, and I’ve added a string field that holds the XML string from the DB. The problem is, when I’m reading this XML back from the SystemAction objects, I’m struggling with a way to generically translate it back into it’s correct metadata object. Each metadata object is going to have different fields, and each object has it’s own static method that takes an XML string and attempts to return the metadata object type. So I could say:
SomeActionMetadata mdObj = SomeActionMetadata.BuildFromXML(xmlStringFromDB);
But I really don’t know of a way to say “Here’s some XML that could translate to any number of different objects. Figure it out and give me the right object back.”
Given my current implementation, I could always just assign a unique ID to each metadata object that is stored as a field in each object, then use a case statement to switch on that ID and use the appropriate class’s static build method to build the right object. But I was hoping for something a little more automatic than that. What if I have a List of SystemAction objects and just want to loop through them and generate the correct metadata object type?
I was hoping someone might have run across something similar to this before, or could point me to an article or post that could help me out. Thanks very much.
As indicated by Subhash Dike in the comments below, there is a similar SO question here that was able to point me in the right direction.