Instantiating anonymous object using C# object initializer syntax stored in string

Question

Using the C# object initializer syntax I can instantiate an anonymous object like this:

object empData = new { name = "bob", age = 30, salary = 100000 };

But what if I have the initializer stored in a string, e.g.:

string init = "{ name = \"bob\", age = 30, salary = 100000 }";

Whats the best way of converting this string into an instance of the object?

Answer 1

Anonymous classes are C# syntactic sugar (see Remarks section here). csc.exe creates a class with private fields and a read/write property with the type inferred from context. All uses of the object are, again, inferred.

What this means is you cannot create an anonymous class at run time because the CLR sees them no differently than any other class (again, because it is C# syntactic sugar).

So instead:

• Use a Dictionary<string,object>
• Use JSON.NET, XML or something like it that has some already-defined scheme for parsing a string to get an object. This requires the properties be well-defined, however.
• Use System.Reflection.Emit to create the type at run-time, but I see no real benefit to this over just a Dictionary<string,object>

I also have concerns of what you're doing because this as a string very likely means to me that you are accepting user input of some kind. Be wary of the security issues in whatever you do.

Answer 2

It's not possible using anonymous types, however you can do it with Reflection Emit using the TypeBuilder class, specifically TypeBuilder.Create(..).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.reflection.emit.typebuilder.createtype.aspx