Unable to cast object of type 'System.Object[]' to 'MyObject[]', what gives?

Question

Scenario:

I\'m currently writing a layer to abstract 3 similar webservices into one useable class. Each webservice exposes a set of objects that share commonality. I hav

Answer 1

in C# 2.0 you can do this using reflection, without using generics and without knowing the desired type at compile time.

//get the data from the object factory
object[] newDataArray = AppObjectFactory.BuildInstances(Type.GetType("OutputData"));
if (newDataArray != null)
{
    SomeComplexObject result = new SomeComplexObject();
    //find the source
    Type resultTypeRef = result.GetType();
    //get a reference to the property
    PropertyInfo pi = resultTypeRef.GetProperty("TargetPropertyName");
    if (pi != null)
    {
        //create an array of the correct type with the correct number of items
        pi.SetValue(result, Array.CreateInstance(Type.GetType("OutputData"), newDataArray.Length), null);
        //copy the data and leverage Array.Copy's built in type casting
        Array.Copy(newDataArray, pi.GetValue(result, null) as Array, newDataArray.Length);
    }
}

You would want to replace all the Type.GetType("OutputData") calls and the GetProperty("PropertyName") with some code that reads from a config file.

I would also use a generic to dictate the creation of SomeComplexObject

T result = new T();
Type resultTypeRef = result.GetType();

But I said you didn't need to use generics.

No guarantees on performance/efficiency, but it does work.