Question

I need to parse a simple statement (essentially a chain of function calls on some object) represented as a string variable into a CodeDom object (probably a subclass of CodeStatement). I would also like to provide some default imports of namespaces to be able to use less verbose statements.

I have looked around SO and the Internet to find some suggestions but I’m quite confused about what is and isn’t possible and what is the simplest way to do it. For example this question seems to be almost what I want, unfortunately I can’t use the solution as the CodeSnippetStatement seems not to be supported by the execution engine that I use (the WF rules engine).

Any suggestions that could help me / point me into the right direction ?

Answer 1

There is no library or function to parse C# code into CodeDOM objects as part of the standard .NET libraries. The CodeDOM libraries have some methods that seem to be designed for this, but none of them are actually implemented. As far as I know, there is some implementation available in Visual Studio (used e.g. by designers), but that is only internal.

CodeSnippetStatement is a CodeDOM node that allows you to place any string into the generated code. If you want to create CodeDOM tree just to generate C# source code, than this is usually fine (the source code generator just prints the string to the output). If the WF engine needs to understand the code in your string (and not just generate source code and compile it), than CodeSnippetStatement won’t work.

However, there are 3rd party tools that can be used for parsing C# source code. In one project I worked on, we used NRefactory library (which is used in SharpDevelop) and it worked quite well. It gives you some tree (AST) representing the parsed code and I’m afraid you’ll need to convert this to the corresponding CodeDOM tree yourself.