I'm in a situation where I'd like to instantiate an object of a type that will be determined at runtime. I also need to perform an explicit cast to that type.
Something like this:
static void castTest(myEnum val)
{
//Call a native function that returns a pointer to a structure
IntPtr = someNativeFunction(..params..);
//determine the type of the structure based on the enum value
Type structType = getTypeFromEnum(val);
structType myStruct = (structType)Marshal.PtrToStructure(IntPtr, structType);
}
This is obviously not valid code, but I hope it conveys the essence of what I'm trying to do. The method I'm actually working on will have to perform the marshaling operation on ~35 different types. I have several other methods that will need to do something similar with the same set of types. So, I'd like to isolate the type-determining logic from these methods so that I only need to write it once, and so that the methods stay clean and readable.
I must admit to being a total novice at design. Could anyone suggest a good approach to this problem? I suspect there might be an appropriate design pattern that I'm unaware of.