Dynamically invoking a method with Reflection in .NET C#

Say you do not have access to a .NET assembly at compile time but you want to run code in it. It’s possible to dynamically load an assembly and run code in it without early access.

Here we’ll see how to invoke a method of a type in a referenced assembly.

Open Visual Studio and create a new C# class library project called Domain. Add the following Customer class to it:

public class Customer
{
	private string _name;

	public Customer() : this("N/A")
	{}

	public Customer(string name)
	{
		_name = name;
	}

        public void DoVoidMethod(int intParameter, string stringParameter)
	{
		Console.WriteLine("Within Customer.DoVoidMethod. Parameters: {0}, {1}", intParameter, stringParameter);
	}

	public int DoRetMethod(int intParameter)
	{
		return intParameter + 1;
	}
}

Build the solution and locate the compiled Domain.dll library. It should be located in either the Debug or Release folder within the bin folder depending on the compilation configuration in VS. Copy the .dll and put it somewhere else on your main drive where you can easily find it. We’re pretending that you got the library from another source but you for whatever reason cannot reference it at compile time. E.g. the source is loaded into your app as a plugin which follows some naming conventions so that your code can unwrap it and invoke its code.

In this post we saw how to invoke a constructor so we won’t go into that again. Once you have an instance of the object then you can use the Type object to find the available methods, properties, events etc. of that type: MethodInfo, EventInfo, PropertyInfo etc.

Let’s see how we can get hold of the void method. First we’ll invoke the overloaded constructor:

string pathToDomain = @"C:\Studies\Reflection\Domain.dll";
Assembly domainAssembly = Assembly.LoadFrom(pathToDomain);
Type customerType = domainAssembly.GetType("Domain.Customer");
Type[] stringArgumentTypes = new Type[] { typeof(string) };
ConstructorInfo stringConstructor = customerType.GetConstructor(stringArgumentTypes);
object newStringCustomer = stringConstructor.Invoke(new object[] { "Elvis" });

Then we locate the DoVoidMethod method and invoke it on the newStringCustomer object. We also provide an object array to represent the arguments to the method.

MethodInfo voidMethodInfo = customerType.GetMethod("DoVoidMethod");
voidMethodInfo.Invoke(newStringCustomer, new object[] { 3, "hello" });

If you run this code then a Console window should pop up with the message “Within Customer.DoVoidMethod. Parameters: 3, hello” on it.

Next we’ll invoke the DoRetMethod method and read its return value:

MethodInfo retMethodInfo = customerType.GetMethod("DoRetMethod");
int returnValue = Convert.ToInt32(retMethodInfo.Invoke(newStringCustomer, new object[] { 4 }));

The returnValue variable will be 5 as expected.

View all posts on Reflection here.