Question

This might be a dumb question, but I’d love to know if there was a way I could do this.

To ease the process of importing lots and lots of Space-delimited files, I came up with a simple scheme to describe the layout in a dynamic type and throw it to a parser which calls a delegate.

A layout looks likes this:

var layout = new 
{
    Code = new SDFColumn() { Start = 0, Length = 20 },
    Name = new SDFColumn() { Start = 20, Length = 3 }
    // etc
};

All works great. I’m now in a situation where I have 2 very large SDFs to import, whose structure is 85% identical, bar a few differences at the end.

Is there a way to append the layout of one to another, e.g:

var layoutCommon = new
{
     /* Common fields */
};

var layoutFile01 = new
{
     /* Changes for first file type */
};

var layoutFile02 = new
{
     /* Changes for the second file type */
};


var finalLayout = /* ??? */;

One thing I realised would not work, was:

var completeLayout = { };

if(file01)
    completeLayout = { /* everything */ };
else
    completeLayout = { /* everything */ };

This doesn’t work, obviously, because all 3 types are fundamentally different.

Any ideas would be appreciated 🙂

Answer 1

Have you tried using dynamic instead of var? That should delay typing until runtime, so your potential objects don’t have to match. var is simply a substitute for any static type; it’s not actually dynamic at all.