Friday, June 15, 2007
Messages and KnownTypes, a better solution

I think I've come across a better solution (or at least one that I'm happier with) to this problem.  Turns out that the KnownType attribute can take a method name instead of a type.  The type it's applied to then has to implement a static method with that name that returns an array of Type.  That method can then decide which types to return.  So I could do something like this

[DataContract]

[KnownType("CheckForConfiguredOverrides")]

public class UserBase

{

    [DataMember]

    public string FirstName;

    [DataMember]

    public string LastName;

 

    public static Type[] CheckForConfiguredOverrides()

    {

        List<Type> result = new List<Type>();

 

        string thisTypeName = typeof(UserBase).FullName;

        string overrideType = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get(thisTypeName);

        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(overrideType))

        {

            Type type = Type.GetType(overrideType);

            if (type != null) result.Add(type);

        }

 

        return result.ToArray();

    }

}

Then in the config file (this ultimately will use our distributed configuration service) I add

<appSettings>

  <add key="UserBaseType.UserBase" value="UserBaseType.BankUser"/>

</appSettings>

 
To return the right type.  Everybody is happy!  As a side benefit, this allows me to limit "overridability" to only those types I apply the attribute to.  That lets me (as the designer) decide which types are OK to subclass and which aren't (obviously I could use sealed here as well, but that's a separate issue) using this KnownType attribute.  I think this will work out much better than marking up base classes with specific types.

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Friday, June 15, 2007 7:43:46 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |  Related posts:
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