Paulo Morgado

In a previous post I showed how to create expression trees to set properties on an object.

The way I did it was not very developer friendly. It involved explicitly creating the necessary expressions because the compiler won’t generate expression trees with property or field set expressions.

Recently someone contacted me the help develop some kind of command pattern framework that used developer friendly lambdas to generate property set expression trees.

Simply putting, given this entity class:

public class Person
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

The person in question wanted to write code like this:

var et = Set((Person p) => p.Name = "me");

Where et is the expression tree that represents the property assignment.

So, if we can’t do this, let’s try the next best thing that is splitting retrieving the property information from the retrieving the value to assign o the property:

var et = Set((Person p) => p.Name, () => "me");

And this is something that the compiler can handle.

The implementation of Set receives an expression to retrieve the property information from and another expression the retrieve the value to assign to the property:

public static Expression<Action<TEntity>> Set<TEntity, TValue>(
    Expression<Func<TEntity, TValue>> propertyGetExpression,
    Expression<Func<TValue>> valueExpression)

The implementation of this method gets the property information form the body of the property get expression (propertyGetExpression) and the value expression (valueExpression) to build an assign expression and builds a lambda expression using the same parameter of the property get expression as its parameter:

public static Expression<Action<TEntity>> Set<TEntity, TValue>(
    Expression<Func<TEntity, TValue>> propertyGetExpression,
    Expression<Func<TValue>> valueExpression)
{
    var entityParameterExpression = (ParameterExpression)(((MemberExpression)(propertyGetExpression.Body)).Expression);

    return Expression.Lambda<Action<TEntity>>(
        Expression.Assign(propertyGetExpression.Body, valueExpression.Body),
        entityParameterExpression);
}

And now we can use the expression to translate to another context or just compile and use it:

var et = Set((Person p) => p.Name, () => name);
Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: p => (p.Name = “me”)

var d = et.Compile();

d(person);
Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: me

It can even support closures:

var et = Set((Person p) => p.Name, () => name);
Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: p => (p.Name = value(<>c__DisplayClass0).name)

var d = et.Compile();

name = "me";
d(person);
Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: me

name = "you";
d(person);
Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: you

Not so useful in the intended scenario (but still possible) is building an expression tree that receives the value to assign to the property as a parameter:

public static Expression<Action<TEntity, TValue>> Set<TEntity, TValue>(Expression<Func<TEntity, TValue>> propertyGetExpression)
{
    var entityParameterExpression = (ParameterExpression)(((MemberExpression)(propertyGetExpression.Body)).Expression);
    var valueParameterExpression = Expression.Parameter(typeof(TValue));

    return Expression.Lambda<Action<TEntity, TValue>>(
        Expression.Assign(propertyGetExpression.Body, valueParameterExpression),
        entityParameterExpression,
        valueParameterExpression);
}

This new expression can be used like this:

var et = Set((Person p) => p.Name);
Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: (p, Param_0) => (p.Name = Param_0)

var d = et.Compile();

d(person, "me");
Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: me

d(person, "you");
Console.WriteLine(person.Name); // Prints: you

The only caveat is that we need to be able to write code to read the property in order to write to it.

In my previous post I showed how to hydrate objects by creating instances and setting properties in those instances.

But, if the intent is to hydrate the objects from data, why not having an expression that does just that? That’s what the member initialization expression is for.

To create such an expression we need the constructor expression and the property binding expressions:

var properties = objectType.GetProperties();
var bindings = new MemberBinding[properties.Length];
var valuesArrayExpression = Expression.Parameter(typeof(object[]), "v");

for (int p = 0; p < properties.Length; p++)
{
    var property = properties[p];

    bindings[p] = Expression.Bind(
        property,
        Expression.Convert(
            Expression.ArrayAccess(
                valuesArrayExpression,
                Expression.Constant(p, typeof(int))
            ),
            property.PropertyType
        )
    );
}

var memberInitExpression = Expression.MemberInit(
    Expression.New(objectType),
    bindings
);

var objectHidrationExpression = Expression.Lambda<Func<object[], object>>(memberInitExpression, valuesArrayExpression);

var compiledObjectHidrationExpression = objectHidrationExpression.Compile();

This might seem more complex than the previous solution, but using it is a lot more simple:

for (int o = 0; o < objects.Length; o++)
{
    newObjects[o] = compiledObjectHidrationExpression(objects[o]);
}

No. I’m not proposing to get rid of objects.

A colleague of mine was asked if I knew a way to dump a list of objects of unknown type into a DataTable with better performance than the way he was using.

The objects being dumped usually have over a dozen of properties, but, for the sake of this post, let’s assume they look like this:

class SomeClass
{
    public int Property1 { get; set; }
    public long Property2 { get; set; }
    public string Property3 { get; set; }
    public object Property4 { get; set; }
    public DateTimeOffset Property5 { get; set; }
}

The code he was using was something like this:

var properties = objectType.GetProperties();

foreach (object obj in objects)
{
    foreach (var property in properties)
    {
        property.GetValue(obj, null);
    }
}

For a list of one million objects, this is takes a little over 6000 milliseconds on my machine.

I immediately thought: Expression Trees!

If the type of the objects was know at compile time, it would be something like this:

Expression<Func<SomeClass, int>> expression = o => o.Property1;
var compiled = expression.Compile();
var propertyValue = compiled.Invoke(obj);

But, at compile time, the type of the object and, consequently, the type of its properties, is unknown. So, we’ll need, for each property, an expression tree like this:

Expression<Func<object, object>> expression = o => ((SomeClass)o).Property1;

The previous expression gets the value of a property of the conversion of the parameter of type object to the type of the object. The result must also be converted to type object because the type of the result must match the type of the return value of the expression.

For the same type of objects, the collection of property accessors would be built this way:

var compiledExpressions = (from property in properties
                           let objectParameter = Expression.Parameter(typeof(object), "o")
                           select
                             Expression.Lambda<Func<object, object>>(
                                 Expression.Convert(
                                     Expression.Property(
                                         Expression.Convert(
                                             objectParameter,
                                             objectType
                                         ),
                                         property
                                     ),
                                     typeof(object)
                                 ),
                                 objectParameter
                             ).Compile()).ToArray();

Looks bit overcomplicated, but reading all properties of all objects for the same object set with this code:

foreach (object obj in objects)
{
    foreach (var compiledExpression in compiledExpressions)
    {
        compiledExpression (obj);
    }
}

takes a little over 150 milliseconds on my machine.

That’s right. 2.5% of the previous time.