Populating and Using Dynamic Classes in C#/.NET 4.0
- by Bob
In our application we're considering using dynamically generated classes to hold a lot of our data. The reason for doing this is that we have customers with tables that have different structures. So you could have a customer table called "DOG" (just making this up) that contains the columns "DOGID", "DOGNAME", "DOGTYPE", etc. Customer #2 could have the same table "DOG" with the columns "DOGID", "DOG_FIRST_NAME", "DOG_LAST_NAME", "DOG_BREED", and so on. We can't create classes for these at compile time as the customer can change the table schema at any time.
At the moment I have code that can generate a "DOG" class at run-time using reflection. What I'm trying to figure out is how to populate this class from a DataTable (or some other .NET mechanism) without extreme performance penalties. We have one table that contains ~20 columns and ~50k rows. Doing a foreach over all of the rows and columns to create the collection take about 1 minute, which is a little too long.
Am I trying to come up with a solution that's too complex or am I on the right track? Has anyone else experienced a problem like this? Create dynamic classes was the solution that a developer at Microsoft proposed. If we can just populate this collection and use it efficiently I think it could work.
