Can I Create a Dictionary of Generic Types?

Question

I\'d like to create a Dictionary object, with string Keys, holding values which are of a generic type. I imagine that it would look something like this:

Dict         


        

Answer 1

We're using lots of reflection to create an extensible administration tool. We needed a way to register items in the global search in the module definition. Each search would return results in a consistent way, but each one had different dependencies. Here's an example of us registering search for a single module:

public void ConfigureSearch(ISearchConfiguration config)
    {
        config.AddGlobalSearchCallback((query, ctx) =>
        {
            return ctx.Positions.Where(p => p.Name.Contains(query)).ToList().Select(p =>
                new SearchResult("Positions", p.Name, p.ThumbnailUrl,
                    new UrlContext("edit", "position", new RouteValueDictionary(new { Id = p.Id }))
                    ));
        });
    }

In the background during module registration, we iterate over every module and add the Func to a SearchTable with an instance of:

public class GenericFuncCollection : IEnumerable>
{
    private List> objects = new List>();

    /// 

    /// Stores a list of Func of T where T is unknown at compile time.
    /// 
    /// Type of T
    /// Type of the Func
    /// Instance of the Func
    public void Add(Object func)
    {
        objects.Add(new Tuple(typeof(T1), typeof(T2), func));
    }

    public IEnumerator> GetEnumerator()
    {
        return objects.GetEnumerator();
    }

    System.Collections.IEnumerator System.Collections.IEnumerable.GetEnumerator()
    {
        return objects.GetEnumerator();
    }
}

Then when we finally call it, we do it with reflection:

var dependency = DependencyResolver.Current.GetService(search.Item1);
var methodInfo = search.Item2.GetMethod("Invoke");
return (IEnumerable)methodInfo.Invoke(search.Item3, new Object[] { query, dependency });