Acidmanic.Utilities.Reflections 1.0.1

Reflection

This Library Contains some of Reflection-related codes I usually get around in different projects. Currently the library contains tools to help

• Instantiation and initialization
• Browsing/reading and writing objects members tree-wise
• Exploring object types characteristics

Attributes

Following attributes are defined to mark classes and their properties with their data-related behaviors. This can be useful for any data-binding usage.

ModelBuilder

This class helps you create and instantiate a Model class dynamically during the runtime.

Object Tree

DataPoint

This is a simple structure of an string identifier and a value (object). Such class is helpful to store all the data of a data-structure into small points that it has been broken into.

Record

A Record is a List of Data-points. It's helpful to keep related data-points together.

ObjectEvaluator

This class Will help working with models in runtime. It can flatten the whole object tree, or read/write data into it. an ObjectEvaluator can address any member using a so called "Standard" address/key. You can instantiate ObjectEvaluators in two ways.

1. By Passing the target object into constructor
2. By Passing the target type into constructor

The first method can be used to read all members and their sub-members into a flat structure, from an existing model. on the other hand with second method, you can create an object from scratch and set the value for any of it's member and their sub-members easily.

Standard Addresses

An standard address in this library, is an string that points to a specific part of an object, Following these rules:

1. Standard address of the root object is the name of it's type.
2. The Standard address of any property of an object, is the Standard address of the object plus a "." and then the name of the property.
3. If the object being pointed at, is any kind of collection, Its address will be followed by "[-1]". Changing the -1, to N >= 0, would mean that the address is pointing to the N'th value of collection.

Some Examples:

Consider these classes:

  class Child {
   
      public string Name {get;set;}
      public int Id {get;set;}
  }

  class Information   {

      public string Content {get;set;}
      public string Title {get;set;}
  }

  class Parent {
      
      public int Id {get;set;}
      public List<Child> Children {get;set;}
      public Information Information {get;set;}
  }

For these examples, consider the Parent class, for the top level object. The object three will be something like:

---Parent
 |       
 +-------Id                                     [T]
 +-------[Children]
 |     |
 |     +--------------Children[N]
 |               |
 |               +-------------------Name       [T]
 |               +-------------------Id         [T]
 |
 |-------Information
 |    |
 |    +--------------Content                    [T]
 |    +--------------Title                      [T]
  

The fields that have [T] mark in front of theme, are the leaves of the whole object's tree structure.

For this example, the addresses of nodes will be as following:

*: If in actual data, there is a n'th member in Parent.Children list. but for a type without ay data, n would be -1. Parent.Children[n], still would be of type Child, but such member does not exists yet.

Type Helpers

TypeCheck

Is A static class providing some useful methods for a given Type.

Tests

RAssert

This class works somehow like most Assert implementations in test frameworks. By providing a Equal(object,object) method. This method performs a deep member-by-member equality check between to given objects, disregarding their type. It checks to see if two given objects have the same corresponding members, and if all of these members have the same value.

Object Extension Methods

Using this library, you will get some extension methods added to any object. these methods are useful for comparing and copying objects without knowing their type. These methods will explore the whole object-tree to perform their tasks.