Getting at non-public property setters in a nice way :)

I’m sure every seasoned .NET developer has been in the situation at one stage or another, probably in testing code, where they need to access a non-public setter of a property (or maybe a private member), and it can’t be mocked.  We all know the (somewhat scary) reflection trick to get at the said setter method and invoke it.   I just hit this problem today trying to mock some response messages from a Microsoft Dynamics XRM 2011 OrganizationService.  Thankfully F# gives us cool things like Quotations and symbolic functions (custom operators) to make this process more succinct.  Instead of writing a method to reflect on a type, get the relevant method, then finally invoke the method and pass in both the original object instance and the new value being set, we can do the following:

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let (<~) property value =
	match property with 
	| PropertyGet(Some(Value(x)),ri,_) -> 
	    ri.GetSetMethod(true).Invoke(fst x,[|value|]) |> ignore 
	| _ -> failwith "unsupported expression"

PropertyGet is an active pattern defined in the Quotations namespace that matches a piece of code that is accessing a property. The first value bound in the pattern (if it exists) is a tuple containing the object instance that the property was accessed on and its type.  The second value bound (ri) is the PropertyInfo for the property in question from the System.Reflection namespace.  Using this information we can simply obtain the Set method, and invoke it on the first item in the x tuple and pass in the new value as its argument.

To use this is simple :

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<@ entity.Attributes @> <~ newAttributes

Simply quote the property in question, and invoke the operator with the new value (that looks very closely like the assignment operator <- ) :)

Another little use for operators  I embraced is to deal with potential null values on properties when you are accessing them (assuming you don’t go all out and wrap everything in the Option type – you might not have the option to do this though (pun intended)) – write a custom operator like that lets you provide a default value if the property evaluates to null :

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let (>?) input def = input |> function null -> def | _ -> input

Now you can use this like so, instead of having to repeat the code above all over the place, or explicitly call a function :

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match e.Attributes >? [||] |> Array.tryFind(fun am -> am.SchemaName = req.Attribute.SchemaName ) with ...

All in all, loving the custom operators you can define in F# especially as you can scope them however you like, even in nested functions :)