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DXCore Plugin Part 3

In a previous post, I mentioned my ongoing progress with a DX Core plugin. I’d been using it successfully for some time now but had to dust it off again last week. Another convention that I’m required to abide for consistency sake but don’t much care for is explicit typing of my variables.

That is, I prefer declarations like:

var myTypeWithLongName = new TypeWithALongName();

rather than:

TypeWithALongName myTypeWithLongName = new TypeWithALongName();

I personally find the second to be needlessly syntactically noisy, and I don’t really see any benefit since the implicit (var) typing preserves strong typing and even causes the resulting type to show up in Intellisense. But, when in Rome…

Compared to my previous setup, this was relatively straightforward. Initially, I thought it would be even simpler than it turned out to be, since Code Rush itself supports the explicit/implicit conversion as an individual refactoring. I figured I’d just have to iterate through the file and call something like “Some.CodeRush.Namespace.MakeExplicit(myVariable)”.

Well, it didn’t turn out to be that easy (at least not that I found), but it did turn out to be relatively simple. Eliding the part about actually finding the variables, I was able to accomplish what I wanted with this method:

/// Convert the local variable declaration to FSG's standard of explicit typing
/// Variable object to convert
/// A string with the new type declaration
public string ConvertDeclaration(Variable variable)
{
    var myImplicit = variable as ImplicitVariable;
    string myString = variable.MemberType;
    if (myImplicit != null)
    {
        var myObjectCreation = myImplicit.Expression as ObjectCreationExpression;
        if (myObjectCreation != null && myObjectCreation.ObjectType != null)
        {
            myString = myObjectCreation.ObjectType.ToString();
        }

        var myArrayCreate = myImplicit.Expression as ArrayCreateExpression;
        if (myArrayCreate != null)
        {
            myString = myArrayCreate.BaseType.ToString();
        }
    }
    return myString;
}

This isn’t actully my finished ‘production’ code, but it’s easier to display in this format. I didn’t like the size of that method, so I created an abstract ExplicitExpressionConverter and gave it inheritors ObjectCreationExpressionConverter and ArrayCreateExpressionConverter, using a factory method creation pattern to figure out which to create, based on the variable. But while that abstraction makes the code cleaner, it makes the logic harder to document in a blog post.

So, anyway, the idea here is that you need to convert the variable you find into the appropriate type of expression. An object creation expression is standard allocation, and the array create expression is a special case. There are other special cases as well, such as null coalescing (var myFoo = someClass.GetAFoo() ?? new Foo()) and method call expression (var myFoo = someClass.GetAFoo()), but I have not yet figured out how to obtain the return type from those expressions. I’ll probably add a part 4 if/when I do.