Dynamically define the type or result of the generic method invoked?


My apologies if the question is somewhat unclear; I'm not entirely certain how to phrase this.

My issue is this. I have two classes, Manager<T> and Result<T>. Within Manager<T>, I have a whole raft of retrieval functions. Ordinarily, I would call Manager<T> and set its type like so:

Manager<SpecialDataType> mgr = new Manager<SpecialDataType>;

After which I set up my Result type, and fill it with my function from Manager, where 1 is a parameter for the GetItem function shown. I can then access things in my item:

Result<SpecialDataType> item = new Result<SpecialDataType>;
item = mgr.GetItem(1);
string x = item.Teaser;

OK. So now, what I'm trying to do is set the <SpecificDataType> to be filled in at run time. I think I've got half of the solution already, using generic types, like so:

Type generalType= Type.GetType("SpecificDataType");
Type managerType= typeof(Manager<>).MakeGenericType(generalType);
var managerInstance= Activator.CreateInstance(managerType);
object[] args = {1};
MethodInfo getItemMethod = managerInstance.GetMethod("GetItem");

But here's where I get stuck. There are specific properties that my Result class has that I need to be able to access. They are, or course, set by the data type I'm casting into. When I do an Invoke, like so:

var item = getItemMethod.Invoke(managerInstance, args);

I'm not getting any of my properties that I know are part of item. That makes sense, I suppose, because we don't know what item is. So, we tried this:

Type dataType = typeof(SmartFormData<>).MakeGenericType(sfType);
var item = Activator.CreateInstance(dataType);
item = getItemMethod.Invoke(managerInstance, args);

And got the same result. I can't seem to get to item.Teaser.

I'm not a c# coder natively (as though that's not apparent already from this overly complicated question I'm asking), so I'm not incredibly familiar with reflection and generic types. Can anyone point me in the right direction for how to solve this problem, or how to approach it from a different angle? The only caveat is that I cannot modify the Manager<T> and Result<T> functions; I have to use what I'm given there.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

As Dark Falcon correctly notes in his comment you will have to use reflection to get the members of your item.

Or, if you are in .NET 4 or above, you can use the dynamic keyword to greatly simplify things:

Type generalType= Type.GetType("SpecificDataType");
dynamic managerInstance = Activator.CreateInstance(managerType);
var item = managerInstance.GetItem(1);
string x = item.Teaser;