Ashraf Moollan's Blog

I had a fairly simple problem recently (well, most problems are simple – solutions are not always so). I had an interface for a class that exposed about a dozen or so methods, and I needed to call them all, one at a time. The methods were parameterless and the return types were identical. Basically the methods was returning Generic dictionaries of Strings.

E.g.

IStaticData staticData = StaticDataImporterFactory.GetStaticDataAdapter();
Dictionary <string, string> dic = staticData.GetSomeValues();

Rather than writing code line by line that would call each method in that interface, I reflected (pun intended) there must be a better(?) way of doing this, and came up with the idea to use Reflection to discover the methods in the interface programmatically and then call them. Here is the code:

IStaticData staticData = StaticDataImporterFactory.GetStaticDataAdapter();
Type type = typeof(IStaticData);
System.Reflection.MethodInfo[] methodInfos = type.GetMethods();
foreach (System.Reflection.MethodInfo methodInfo in methodInfos)
{
  try
  {
    Dictionary result = (Dictionary)methodInfo.Invoke(staticData, null);
    // do whatever work I have to do with the result
  }
  catch (Exception ex)
  {
    // handle the error
    txtError.Text += "Could not execute " + methodInfo.Name + Environment.NewLine;
  }
 }

The above code relies on the assumption that the methods to call are parameterless. If you wish to pass parameters to the methods, have a look at MethodInfo.GetParameters() to determine at runtime what the parameters are, and you can then pass them as additional arguments to the Invoke method (noticed I passed null above?)

And the deed is done.

Cheers
Ash Moollan