Question

I’ve got an export process which takes an annotated class as an output file definition (much like Linq-To-Entities)

A class looks something like this:

<ExportDefinition(Name:="Some Export Format")>
Public Class SomeExportFormat
    Overridable Property Id As Integer

    <DisplayName("Customer Name")>
    Overridable Property CustomerName As String


End Class

Properties are overridable as I sometimes have to proxy.

I need to add functionality which allows the specification of transient formats (A WCF call to request export of specific data with a one-time format).

To avoid re-writing a lot of the export code, I’d like to take the definition I’m passed via WCF and define a new class.

Is my best bet to use System.CodeDom.Compiler or is there a more elegant solution?

Answer 1

Personally, I’d be looking at TypeBuilder, but I’m a little bit… unbalanced, and ready to hop into ILGenerator. But yes, You can create new subclasses that way. Watch out, though – WCF and EF won’t automatically accept your types. Most inheritance-aware libraries (which includes WCF and EF) will hate dynamic subclasses, since they weren’t expecting them and will treat them as completely unexpected data.