Do Assemblies have to be physical files? - WepAPI

Question 1

Ok, I figured this out. I was using reflections to get the assembly and then serializing the Assembly type. Assembly only provides property information for the physical file assembly and it does not contain an entire graph of the file. I hope this helps someone, lesson learned!

So I just used this on the controller and then the revers on the client.

    public MemoryStream Get()
    {
        List<MemoryStream> leadTypeAssemblyStreams = new List<MemoryStream>();

        foreach (string dllAssembly in _leadTypeNamespaces)
        {
            using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
            {
                string filename = dllAssembly;

                if (!filename.Contains(".dll"))
                    filename = filename + ".dll";

                using (FileStream file = new FileStream(AssemblyDirectory + "\\" + filename, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
                {
                    byte[] bytes = new byte[file.Length];
                    file.Read(bytes, 0, (int)file.Length);
                    ms.Write(bytes, 0, (int)file.Length);
                    file.Close();

                    leadTypeAssemblyStreams.Add(ms);
                    ms.Close();
                }
            }    
        }

        return new MemoryStream(SerializeObj(leadTypeAssemblyStreams));
    }

    internal static string AssemblyDirectory
    {
        get
        {
            string codeBase = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase;
            UriBuilder uri = new UriBuilder(codeBase);
            string path = Uri.UnescapeDataString(uri.Path);
            return Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
        }
    }


    internal static byte[] SerializeObj(object obj)
    {
        using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream())
        {
            BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();

            formatter.Serialize(stream, obj);

            byte[] bytes = stream.ToArray();
            stream.Close();

            return bytes;
        }
    }

Now, I can just call the GetDeserializedFileStreamPaths(stream) and it will return a physical path to the files that were streamed from the WebApi. Here is my WebApiClient class the UI will reference.

public class LFGWebApiClientHelpers
{
    public List<Type> GetLeadTypes(Stream stream)
    {
        List<string> assembliesFilePath = GetDeserializedFileStreamPaths(stream);
        List<Assembly> assemblies = new List<Assembly>();

        foreach (string filePath in assembliesFilePath)
        {
            assemblies.Add(Assembly.LoadFile(filePath));
        }

        List<Type> leadTypes = new List<Type>();

        foreach (Assembly asm in assemblies)
        {
            Type leadType = asm.GetTypes().Where(x => x.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(WebApiExportedTypeAttribute), false).Length > 0).FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Contains("Lead"));
            leadTypes.Add(leadType);
        }

        return leadTypes;
    }

    private static List<string> GetDeserializedFileStreamPaths(Stream stream)
    {
        try
        {
            List<string> assembliesPath = new List<string>();
            IFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
            List<MemoryStream> leadTypeAssemblyStreams = formatter.Deserialize(stream) as List<MemoryStream>;

            int fileNumber = 1;

            string leadTypeAsseblyDirectory = AssemblyDirectory.Replace("bin", "DownloadedLeadTypeAssemblies");

            if (!Directory.Exists(leadTypeAsseblyDirectory))
                Directory.CreateDirectory(leadTypeAsseblyDirectory);
            try
            {
                if (leadTypeAssemblyStreams == null)
                    throw new Exception("Lead type assembly stream cannot be null.");

                    foreach (MemoryStream leadTypeAssemblyStream in leadTypeAssemblyStreams)
                    {
                        string localFileLocation = leadTypeAsseblyDirectory +
                                                   string.Format("\\LeadType{0}.dll", fileNumber);

                        //add path for return type
                        assembliesPath.Add(localFileLocation);
                        using (
                            FileStream file = new FileStream(localFileLocation, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write))
                        {
                            leadTypeAssemblyStream.WriteTo(file);
                            leadTypeAssemblyStream.Close();
                        }

                        fileNumber++;
                    }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                throw new LGFException().SetMessage(ex);
            }

            stream.Close();

            return assembliesPath;
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            throw new LGFException().SetMessage(ex, "There was a problems during the deserializtion of LeadTypes.");
        }
    }

    private static string AssemblyDirectory
    {
        get
        {
            string codeBase = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase;
            UriBuilder uri = new UriBuilder(codeBase);
            string path = Uri.UnescapeDataString(uri.Path);
            return Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
        }
    }
}

Question 2

You will have to get the assemblies from somewhere, for that you will need to stream the assembly content and call assembly.load(byte[] rawAssembly).

Do Assemblies have to be physical files? - WepAPI

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