Dynamic LINQ Extending

There are several ways to extend the functionality from Dynamic LINQ library.

DynamicLinqType - attribute

It's possible to extend the parsing functionality from Dynamic LINQ by defining some additional logic in static helper/utility classes. To be able to do this, there are several requirements:

• The class needs to be a public static class
• The methods in this class need also to be public and static
• The class itself needs to be annotated with the [DynamicLinqType] attribute

Examples

Create the following utility class.

[DynamicLinqType]
public static class Utils
{
    public static int ParseAsInt(string value)
    {
        if (value == null)
        {
             return 0;
        }

        return int.Parse(value);
    }

    public static int IncrementMe(this int values)
    {
        return values + 1;
    }
}

This class has two simple methods:

• return a integer value of 0 when the input string is null, else parse the string to an integer
• increment an integer value by using an extension method

Usage

This can be used as follows:

var query = new [] { new { Value = (string) null }, new { Value = "100" } }.AsQueryable();
var result = query.Select("Utils.ParseAsInt(Value)");

Extension methods are also supported:

var query = new [] { new { Number = 5 }, new { Number = 7 } }.AsQueryable();
var result = query.Select("Number.IncrementMe()");

Try it online

Notes

This helper class + method will only work when using LINQ to Objects. It will not work for LINQ to Entities and will throw an exception like

System.NotSupportedException: LINQ to Entities does not recognize the method 'Int32 ParseAsInt(System.String)' method, and this method cannot be translated into a store expression.

See failing example.