Materializer

Use your interfaces without implementing them

Get it on nuget

.NET Core CLI

$ dotnet add package Materializer

Package manager:

Install-Package Materializer

What does it do?

Classes can only be combined by inheriting, while interfaces can be combined.

With Materializer you can define your DTOs as interfaces without the need to create classes for each of the combinations you'll want to use.

Given the following interfaces:

inferface IOne
{
	int First { get; set; }
	string Second { get; set; }
}

inferface ITwo
{
	DateTime Third { get; set; }
	Double Fourth { get; set; }
}

inferface ICombined : IOne, ITwo
{
}

Without Materializer you would need to write a class for each of the ones you want to use as DTO, producing a lot of overhead code not really worth anything. With Materializer you can instantiate each interface directly.

var materializer = new Materializer();

// create an object representing the simple IOne interface
var obj1 = materializer.New<IOne>();
obj1.First = 5;
obj1.Second = "Mary Poppins";

// create an object representing the combination interface, ICombined
var obj2 = materializer.New<ICombined>();
obj2.First = 10;
obj2.Second = "Peter Pan";
obj2.Third = DateTime.Now;
obj2.Fourth = 1.0;

Serializable support

NewtonSoft.Json

The created objects are serializable with NewtonSoft.Json without setting any options. (See the tests for sample code.)

.NET serialization

To be serializable with .NET serialization, a class must have the [Serializable] attribute. You can turn this on with the forSerializable option, like this:

var materializer = new Materializer(forSerializable: true);

When you set the forSerializable option on a serializer, all classes made with that serializer will have the [Serializable] attribute: