RTTI: Can I Get a Type by Name?

Question

Given a text string containing a type name, is there some way to get the appropriate type itself?

I'm looking to do something like this:

type
  TSomeType<T> = class
    // yadda yadda
  end;

procedure DoSomething;
var
  obj : TObject;
begin
  o := TSomeType<GetTypeByName('integer')>.Create;
  // do stuff with obj
end;

I've looked at several RTTI explanations online and looked through the Delphi units and don't see what I'm looking for. Is this possible?

Answer 1

No, generics are entirely compiletime.

Answer 2

The new RTTI unit in Delphi 2010 has a way of retrieving types declared in the interface section of units. For any given type, represented by a TRttiType instance, the TRttiType.QualifiedName property returns a name that can be used with TRttiContext.FindType later to retrieve the type. The qualified name is the full unit name (including namespaces, if they exist), followed by a '.', followed by the full type name (including outer types if it nested).

So, you could retrieve a representation of the Integer type (in the form of a TRttiType) with context.FindType('System.Integer').

But this mechanism can't be used to retrieve instantiations of generic types that weren't instantiated at compile time; instantiation at runtime requires runtime code generation.