How to set various properties of an object at runtime?

Question

Say I have an xml file like:

<Filters>
    <Blur Name="Blur01" />
    <Sharpen Name="Sharpen01" Amount=5 />
</Filters>

How do I set the properties of Blur, Sharpen, etc without a performance hit? I thought reflection would work, but the number of nodes and properties will be in millions, so the reflection cost would be very high IMO.

So say I get a list of properties like:

{ "Name", "Amount", ... }

How do I call them on an already initialized object?

I also have the option to pass them to optional arguments as I will be constructing the objects from the xml at the time of reading it.

Answer 1

Use the built-in XML serialization in .NET. If you have performance problems, consider pre-generating the parsers with SGEN.exe.

XML Serializer in .NET

XML Serializer Generator Tool (Sgen.exe)

If you parse yourself, reflection is not terribly expensive if you keep the PropertyInfo objects around.

Finally, you could just write your own parser... but in reality, your XML Serialization that .NET gives works pretty damn well.