Question

I’m playing around with Dictionaries and the new fancy 4.0 dynamic types inside a dictionary.

I have a Dictionary:

Dictionary<dynamic, dynamic> dynamicDic

And I populate it like this:

dynamicDic.Add("First", new Class1());
dynamicDic.Add("Second", new Class2());

For the sake of testing/practising Class1 and Class2 are quite simple:

public class Class1
{
    public string Element { get; set; }

    public List<Class2> Class2 { get; set; }
}

public class Class2
{
    public string Property { get; set; }

    public string Field;
}

I create two other classes that map class1 and class2 and they are virtually the same so ClassMap1 and ClassMap2. I’ll just include CalssMap1 though:

public class ClassMap1: BaseClassMap1
{
    public ClassMap1()
    {
        var r = new Class1();
        Children = new Dictionary<string, dynamic>
            {
                {"Element", r.GetType().GetProperty("Element")},
                {"Class1", r.GetType().GetProperty("Class1")}
            };
        Name = "Root";
        ObjectType = typeof (Class1);
        Parent = "RootElement";
        HasParent = false;
        HasChildren = true;
        IsClass = r.GetType().IsClass;
    }
}

And I create a base class: BaseClass1()

public class BaseClass1
{
    private String _Name;

    public String Name
    {
        get { return _Name; }
        set { _Name = value; }
    }

    private Type _ObjectType;

    public Type ObjectType
    {
        get { return _ObjectType; }
        set { _ObjectType = value; }
    }

    private String _Parent;

    public String Parent
    {
        get { return _Parent; }
        set { _Parent = value; }
    }

    private Dictionary<string, dynamic> _Children;

    public Dictionary<string, dynamic> Children
    {
        get { return _Children; }
        set { _Children = value; }
    }

    private bool _HasParent;

    public bool HasParent
    {
        get { return _HasParent; }
        set { _HasParent = value; }
    }

    private bool _HasChildren;

    public bool HasChildren
    {
        get { return _HasChildren; }
        set { _HasChildren = value; }
    }

    private bool _IsClass;

    public bool IsClass
    {
        get { return _IsClass; }
        set { _IsClass = value; }
    }
}

I populate the classes with data, not really important what data 🙂

Yet when I try to access the values through a Linq statement:

var a = _classObjects.SingleOrDefault(x => x.Key == node.Name).Value;

a only gives me:-

a.Equals(), a.GetType(), a.GetEnumerator() or a.ToString()

I would like to be able to have it do this instead (with intellisense)…

a.Children
a.Name
a.HasParent

etc…

Anyone got any ideas where I’m going wrong?

Oops got that completely wrong… Sorry 😐
Edited above…

Answer 1

dynamic classes are all about run-time (NOT compile-time) discovery. How do you expect Intellisense to know what to do?

Using dynamic classes incurs a high performance overhead. I really suggest that you make it: Dictionary<string, dynamic> dynamicDic.

Or define a MyBaseClass and make it: Dictionary<string, MyBaseClass> myDic.