Returning generic without knowing type

Question

I have a situation where I have a class that accepts an instance of a certain object type in its generic type parameter. The layout is something like this:

public abstract BaseClass { ... }
public DiamondClass : BaseClass { ... }
public SilverClass : BaseClass { ... }

public Handler<T> where T : BaseClass { ... }

I want to be able to create a method to return an instance of Handler<DiamondClass> or Handler<BaseClass> without defining the type upon input. I've tried something along these lines:

public Handler<BaseClass> GetHandler(HandlerType type)
{
    switch(type)
    {
        case HandlerType.Diamond: return new Handler<DiamondClass>();
        case HandlerType.Silver: return new Handler<SilverClass>();
        default: throw new InvalidOperationException("...");
    }
}

But this won't work, because apparently Handler<DiamondClass> won't cast implicitly to Handler<BaseClass>. I can specify it like this:

public Handler<T> GetHandler<T>(HandlerType type) where T : BaseClass
{
    switch(type)
    {
        case HandlerType.Diamond: return (Handler<T>)new Handler<DiamondClass>();
        case HandlerType.Silver: return (Handler<T>)new Handler<SilverClass>();
        default: throw new InvalidOperationException("...");
    }
}

But now I need to call GetHandler<DiamondClass> or GetHandler<BaseClass>. And that defeats the purpose of having a method that returns the proper handler based on an enum, without knowing the type. I hoped that I could define a Type object and pass it, as such:

 Type objType = typeof(DiamondClass);
 var handler = Handler<objType>();

But apparently C# won't allow that kind of foolishness. I've gone about this several different ways, and I'd like to think there's a way to do it, but I'm stumped.

---

(I actually did get this working by returning a dynamic object, but I'd like to avoid it if at all possible, as it loses any type safety and Intellisense support.)

Answer 1

This is where co-variance comes into play, covariance and contra-variance just work only on interface and delegate, so, to solve your problem, just define a new interface IHandler as co-variant with out which specifies that the type parameter is co-variant:

public interface IHandler<out T> where T : BaseClass 
{
}

An interface that has a covariant type parameter enables its methods to return more derived types than those specified by the type parameter

It will work. More information is here