Binding a GridView to a Dynamic or ExpandoObject object

Question

I'm using Rob Conery's Massive ORM, and I haven't been able to bind the resulting ExpandoObject to a GridView.

I did find another Stackoverflow question that suggests using a framework called impromptu, but I'm not sure if that would work for this. If you know it does, please provide a code sample to actually convert an ExpandoObject to something that the GridView control can bind to.

Worst case scenario, has anyone implemented an additional method (that can be shared) for Massive to convert the resulting ExpandoObject to a POCO?

any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Since you can't bind to an ExpandoObject, you can convert the data into a DataTable. This extension method will do that for you. I might submit this for inclusion to Massive.

/// <summary>
/// Extension method to convert dynamic data to a DataTable. Useful for databinding.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="items"></param>
/// <returns>A DataTable with the copied dynamic data.</returns>
public static DataTable ToDataTable(this IEnumerable<dynamic> items) {
    var data = items.ToArray();
    if (data.Count() == 0) return null;

    var dt = new DataTable();
    foreach(var key in ((IDictionary<string, object>)data[0]).Keys) {
        dt.Columns.Add(key);
    }
    foreach (var d in data) {
        dt.Rows.Add(((IDictionary<string, object>)d).Values.ToArray());
    }
    return dt;
}

Answer 2

If we are talking GridView (meaning not WPF) then impromptu can proxy an expando to a poco given an interface. Say we have a list of expando's you can convert them to poco's:

IEnumerable<IMyInterface> listOfPocos
       = Impropmtu.AllActLike<IMyInterface>(listOfExpandos, typeof(INotifyPropertyChanged));