Question

I’m using a third party library which contains a bunch of extension methods on top of IQueryable. To use these extension methods i don’t wish to have my application littered with using statements to the third party namespace in which the extension method resides in.

This is so that i can switch it out the library sometime in the near future as easily as possible. However i’m not sure what’s the best way of doing this. One option i did contemplate was to create my own set of extension methods within the project (then i can control the namespace). The problem with this is i can’t see how i can maintain the name of the existing extension method. For example:

namespace MyProject.Extensions {
    public static class IQueryableExtension {
        public static IQueryable<T> Fetch<T, K>(this IQueryable<T> queryable, Expression<Func<T, K>> selector) {
            return queryable.Fetch(selector);
        }
    }
}

You may see the problem here. Where i am trying to call the third party extension method within mine it actually calls itself creating an infinite loop.

I’d appreciate the help. Thanks

Answer 1

You don’t have to use extension methods as extension methods, you can use them like static methods… so you could call the 3rd party Fetch method:

ThirdPartyNamespace.Fetch(queryable, selector)