In my last post I set the stage for this post by discussing some of my personal opinions around integrating a dynamic language into a .NET application. Using a DSL written in a dynamic language, such as IronRuby, to set up configuration for a .NET application is an interesting approach to application configuration.

With that in mind, I was playing around with some IronRuby interop with the CLR recently. Ruby has this concept called Monkey Patching. You can read the definition in the Wikipedia link I provided, but in short, it is a way to modify the behavior of a class or instance of a class at runtime without changing the source of that class or instance. Kind of like extension methods in C#, but more powerful. Let me provide a demonstration.

I want to pass a C# object instance that happens to have an indexer to a Ruby script via IronRuby. In C#, you can access an indexer property using square brackets like so:

object value = indexer["key"];

Being able to use braces to access this property is merely syntactic sugar by the C# language. Under the hood, this gets compiled to IL as a method named get_Item.

So when passing this object to IronRuby, I need to do the following:

value = $indexer.get_Item("key");

That’s not soooo bad (ok, maybe it is), but we’re not taking advantage of any of the power of Ruby. So what I did was monkey patch the method_missing method onto my object and used the method name as the key to the dictionary. This method allows you to handle unknown method calls on an object instance. You can read this post for a nice brief explanation.

So this allows me now to access the indexer from within Ruby as if it were a simple property access like so:

value = $indexerObject.key

The code for doing this is the following, based on the latest IronRuby code in RubyForge.

ScriptRuntime runtime = IronRuby.CreateRuntime();
ScriptEngine rubyengine = IronRuby.GetEngine(runtime);
RubyExecutionContext ctx = IronRuby.GetExecutionContext(runtime);

ctx.DefineGlobalVariable("indexer", new Indexer());
string requires = 
@"require 'My.NameSpace, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=...'

def $indexer.method_missing(methodname)
  $indexer.get_Item(methodname.to_s)
end
";

//pretend we got the ruby script I really want to run from somewhere else
string rubyScript = GetRubyCode();

string script = requires + rubyScript;
ScriptSource source = rubyengine.CreateScriptSourceFromString(script);
runtime.ExecuteSourceUnit(source);

What’s going on here is that we instantiate the IronRuby runtime and script engine and context (I still need to learn exactly what each of these things are responsible for apart from each other). I then set a global variable and set it to an instance of a CLR object written in C#.

After that, I start constructing a string that contains the beginning of the Ruby script I want to execute. I will pre-append this beginning section with the actual script I want to run.

The beginning of the Ruby script imports the .NET namespace that contains my CLR type to IronRuby (I believe that by default you don’t need to import mscorlib and System).

I then added a missing_method method to that CLR instance within the Ruby code via this snippet.

def $indexer.method_missing(methodname);
  $indexer.get_Item(methodname.to_s)
end

At that point now, when I execute the rest of the ruby script, any calls from within Ruby to this CLR object can take advantage of this new method we patched onto the instance.

Pretty nifty, eh?

In my next post, I will show you the concrete instance of using this and supply source code.