I have static class full of extension methods where each of the methods is asynchronous and returns some value – like this:
public static class MyContextExtensions{
public static async Task<bool> SomeFunction(this DbContext myContext){
bool output = false;
//...doing stuff with myContext
return output;
}
public static async Task<List<string>> SomeOtherFunction(this DbContext myContext){
List<string> output = new List<string>();
//...doing stuff with myContext
return output;
}
}
My goal is to be able to invoke any of these methods from a single method in another class and return their result as an object. It would look something like this:
public class MyHub: Hub{
public async Task<object> InvokeContextExtension(string methodName){
using(var context = new DbContext()){
//This fails because of invalid cast
return await (Task<object>)typeof(MyContextExtensions).GetMethod(methodName).Invoke(null, context);
}
}
}
The problem is that the cast fails. My dilemma is that I cannot pass any type parameters to the "InvokeContextExtension" method because it is part of a SignalR hub and is invoked by javascript. And to a certain extent I don't care about the return type of the extension method because it is just going to get serialized to JSON and sent back to the javascript client. However I do have to cast the value returned by Invoke as a Task in order to use the await operator. And I have to supply a generic parameter with that "Task" otherwise it will treat the return type as void. So it all comes down to how do I successfully cast Task with generic parameter T to a Task with a generic parameter of object where T represents the output of the extension method.
Best Answer
You can do it in two steps -
awaitthe task using the base class, then harvest the result using reflection ordynamic:Here is a complete running example that puts in context the above technique of calling
Taskthrough reflection: