Question

I’m using the Mono.CSharp library to emit code. Following another question on SO (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3407318/mono-compiler-as-a-service-mcs) I managed to get Mono.CSharp evaluating correctly on the Microsoft CLR.

To add flexibility in my app I’d like to be able to customize a query at runtime – by allowing the user to provide a LINQ query as a string that gets parsed and hits the database when executed.

Given this basic snippet of code:

IQueryable<Contact> contacts = GetContacts();
string query = "from contact in contacts
                where contact.Name == \"name\"
                select contact";
var queryableResult = Mono.CSharp.Evaluator.Evaluate(query);

How can I ‘inject’ the contacts variable into the Mono.CSharp.Evaluator to be evaluated as part of the query? Am I going about this the right way? In the end I either need the resulting Expression or the IQueryable from the ‘query’ string.

Answer 1

I think you have a few options:

1. Use static or ThreadStatic variables to exchange data between the caller and you string based code:

   namespace MyNs
   {
     public class MyClass
     {
    [ThreadStatic] // thread static so the data is specific to the calling thread
    public static string MyEnumerableVariable;
   
   
    public void DoSomething() 
    {
         Evaluator.ReferenceAssembly(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());
         Evaluator.Run("using MyNs;")
         // run the dynamic code
         var s = @"return (from contact in MyNs.MyClass.MyEnumerableVariable where contact.Name == ""John"" select contact).ToList();";
         Evaluator.Evaluate(s);
    }
   

   }
   }

2. Return a delegate from your string code:

   
    public void DoSomething() 
    {

   // run the dynamic code
   var s = @"return new Func<string, IQueryable<MyNs.Model.Contact>, IList>((s,q) => (from contact in q where contact.Name == s select contact).ToList());";
   var func = (Func<string, IQueryable<MyNs.Model.Contact>, IList>)Evaluator.Evaluate(s);
   var result = func("John", myQueryableOfContactsFromNHibernate);

   }

3. Go the full blown route.

string query = string.Format(
@"using (var dc = new DataContext()) 
{
  return (from contact in dc.Contacts where contact.Name == ""{0}"" select contact).ToList();
}", "John");

var result = Mono.CSharp.Evaluator.Evaluate(query);