How to deserialize to a dynamic type

Question

I am trying to de-serialize my XML to get an array of a type which is created dynamically (using codedom) and after that I am using reflection to load that assembly and loading the type which is created dynamically. When I try to de-serialize my XML (which has got a collection of objects of this dynamically generated type) I am not sure how do I provide the type to the serializer.

My code sample:

        Assembly assembly = Assembly.LoadFile("myDynamicassembly.dll");
        Type type = assembly.GetType("myDynamicType");

        string xmlstring = myXml.OuterXml.ToString();
        byte[] buffer = ASCIIEncoding.UTF8.GetBytes(xmlstring);
        MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(buffer);
        XmlReader reader = new XmlTextReader(ms);

        myDynamicType[] EQs;
        XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(myDynamicType[]));
        EQs = (myDynamicType[])(serializer.Deserialize(reader));

So, here the problem is that I don't know the "myDynamicType" while writing the code. It will be created and compiled at runtime.

Please help.

Answer 1

The trick here is the Type.MakeArrayType() method on an instance of Type. The parameterless version produces the vector type, i.e. typeof(Foo).MakeArrayType() === typeof(Foo[]). There are other overloads for multi-dimensional arrays etc.

XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(type.MakeArrayType());

However: you will not be able to cast it at the end; you will need to use object[] or similar (using array variance of reference-types):

EQs = (object[])(serializer.Deserialize(reader));