Question

I’m working on a T4 template to automatically generate a C# class definition from an XML file. For each element in the XML document I’d like to determine the type of the content in that element. Is there a framework class that handles automatically determining a type from a string value?

Answer 1

That is a very interesting question but I am afraid you are going to have a tough time finding anything in the FCL that will do this.

If you think about it, your problem is a rather unique one, you have a known type as a conversion source and an unknown output type. This doesn’t come up too often in day-to-day coding using a framework like .NET.

Since the .NET framework is designed to be used with strongly-typed languages, types are very important and most of the time we know what type we want and can request a conversion from some generic source (like a string or an object) to that specific type. That is why we have casting, conversion methods (like Convert.ToInt32 and such), and similar things. They are all designed to allow us to directly state the output type of the conversion since we know what it is that we want to get.

All that being said, I would be interested to see if someone else has written something like this because the parsing that would be involved in getting this to work must be very similar to the C# compiler itself in the way that literal values are handled in source code.