Thursday, March 3, 2011

Exposing the indexer / default property via COM Interop

I am attempting to write a component in C# to be consumed by classic ASP that allows me to access the indexer of the component (aka default property).

For example:
C# component:

public class MyCollection {
    public string this[string key] {
        get { /* return the value associated with key */ }
    }

    public void Add(string key, string value) {
        /* add a new element */
    }
}

ASP consumer:

Dim collection
Set collection = Server.CreateObject("MyCollection ")
Call collection.Add("key", "value")
Response.Write(collection("key")) ' should print "value"

Is there an attribute I need to set, do I need to implement an interface or do I need to do something else? Or this not possible via COM Interop?

The purpose is that I am attempting to create test doubles for some of the built-in ASP objects such as Request, which make use of collections using these default properties (such as Request.QueryString("key")). Alternative suggestions are welcome.

Update: I asked a follow-up question: Why is the indexer on my .NET component not always accessible from VBScript?

From stackoverflow
  • Try setting the DispId attribute of the property to be 0, as described here in the MSDN documentation.

    Mike Henry : Thanks, this got it working but not on this[string key]. I had to apply DispId to another property before it worked.
    Mike Henry : Oops, it appears applying DispId to the indexer, e.g. this[string key], does work if it's not overloaded.
  • Thanks to Rob Walker's tip, I got it working by adding the following method and attribute to MyCollection:

    [DispId(0)]
    public string Item(string key) {
        return this[key];
    }
    

    Edit: See this better solution which uses an indexer.

  • Here is a better solution that uses an indexer rather than an Item method:

    public class MyCollection {
        private NameValueCollection _collection;
    
        [DispId(0)]
        public string this[string name] {
            get { return _collection[name]; }
            set { _collection[name] = value; }
        }
    }
    

    It can be used from ASP like:

    Dim collection
    Set collection = Server.CreateObject("MyCollection")
    collection("key") = "value"
    Response.Write(collection("key")) ' should print "value"
    

    Note: I could not get this to work earlier because I had overloaded the indexer, this[string name], with this[int index].

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