Calling MethodBase's Invoke on a constructor (reflection)

Posted by Alix on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Alix
Published on 2010-03-30T08:17:50Z Indexed on 2010/03/30 8:23 UTC
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Hi everyone. First of all, sorry if this has been asked before. I've done a pretty comprehensive search and found nothing quite like it, but I may have missed something.

And now to the question: I'm trying to invoke a constructor through reflection, with no luck. Basically, I have an object that I want to clone, so I look up the copy constructor for its type and then want to invoke it. Here's what I have:

public Object clone(Object toClone) {
     MethodBase copyConstructor = type.GetConstructor(
         new Type[] { toClone.GetType() });
     return method.Invoke(toClone, new object[] { toClone }); //<-- doesn't work
}

I call the above method like so:

     List list = new List(new int[] { 0, 1, 2 });
     List clone = (List) clone(list);

Now, notice the invoke method I'm using is MethodBase's invoke. ConstructorInfo provides an invoke method that does work if invoked like this:

     return ((ConstructorInfo) method).Invoke(new object[] { toClone });

However, I want to use MethodBase's method, because in reality instead of looking up the copy constructor every time I will store it in a dictionary, and the dictionary contains both methods and constructors, so it's a Dictionary<MethodBase>, not Dictionary<ConstructorInfo>. I could of course cast to ConstructorInfo as I do above, but I'd rather avoid the casting and use the MethodBase method directly. I just can't figure out the right parameters.

Any help? Thanks so much.

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