IronRuby Tip: Using Generic CLR Methods from IronRuby

• Posted by Shay Friedman on October 5, 2009
• 2 comments

A while ago I wrote a post about using Generic CLR classes from IronRuby. This time I’ll share with you its less intuitive friend – using generic CLR methods from IronRuby.

As a result of Ruby being a duck-typed language which works with types implicitly, generics is not really needed. The whole language is generic… This is why using generic CLR types might become a bit odd for the language. Nonetheless, this fact will not stop us. The price to pay in order to enjoy Ruby in the .Net framework is worth it! :)

Anyway, assuming we have the following C# class defined in file sample.dll:

namespace ClassLibrary1
{
    public class Class1
    {
        public string Test<T>(T param)
        {
                return param.ToString();
        }
    }
}

In order to use it with a specific type, you need to do two things – get the generic method object (by using the method method) and provide it with the type via the special of method. For example, the next code invokes Test with a string and pass it “Shay Friedman”:

require "sample.dll"

sample = ClassLibrary1::Class1.new
sample.method(:test).of(String).call("Shay Friedman") # returns "Shay Friedman"

And that’s all there is to know.

All the best,
Shay.