Generics in C#, using type of a variable as parameter [duplicate]

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The point about generics is to give compile-time type safety – which means that types need to be known at compile-time.

You can call generic methods with types only known at execution time, but you have to use reflection:

// For non-public methods, you'll need to specify binding flags too
MethodInfo method = GetType().GetMethod("DoesEntityExist")
                             .MakeGenericMethod(new Type[] { t });
method.Invoke(this, new object[] { entityGuid, transaction });

Ick.

Can you make your calling method generic instead, and pass in your type parameter as the type argument, pushing the decision one level higher up the stack?

If you could give us more information about what you’re doing, that would help. Sometimes you may need to use reflection as above, but if you pick the right point to do it, you can make sure you only need to do it once, and let everything below that point use the type parameter in a normal way.

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