Dapper Transaction Dynamic Objects

Dynamic objects were added in C# 4 and are useful in many dynamic scenarios when dealing with JSON objects. They can also be useful when you don't want to write an entire C# class to match your database table structure. Let's consider the following example, which we previously implemented.

private static List<Author> GetAuthors(params int[] ids)
{
    using (IDbConnection connection = new SqlConnection(ConnectionString))
    {
        connection.Open();

        using (var transaction = connection.BeginTransaction())
        {
            List<Author> authors = 
                transaction.Query<Author>("SELECT * FROM Authors WHERE Id IN @Ids", new { Ids = ids })
                .ToList();

            return authors;
        }
    }
}

Let's implement the same functionality using dynamic objects instead of using the concrete Author class.

private static List<dynamic> GetDynamicAuthors(params int[] ids)
{
    using (IDbConnection connection = new SqlConnection(ConnectionString))
    {
        connection.Open();

        using (var transaction = connection.BeginTransaction())
        {
            List<dynamic> authors = 
                transaction.Query("SELECT * FROM Authors WHERE Id IN @Ids", new { Ids = ids })
                .ToList();

            return authors;
        }
    }
}

You can see that we specified dynamic instead of Author as the generic type, and also, there is no need to specify the generic type of the Query method.

You will notice when you started typing author., you won't get IntelliSense because it's a dynamic object. Let's call this new method and execute the application, and you will see that everything is still working the same.