Class factory reflection question

[Nancy]

I have the following situation and could use some advise.
I have a Base Class CreditReport, classes BoatCreditRepor t and
HomeCreditRepor t Inherit from CreditReport.
I would like to have the CreditReport class in a separate project from
BoatCreditRepor t and HomecreditRepor t for departmental code
development reasons.

I have a CreditFactory class which uses reflection to instantiate the
approprite subclass( BoatCreditRepor t, HomeCreditRepor t, etc) based on
some parm passed in.
The parm passed in will be a fully qualified class name pulled from
the web.config. No problem there.

The problem is; Project 2 & 3 need to reference Project 1 ( because
they inherit). Correct? The CreditFactory(p roject 1) will create an
instance of either BoatCreditRepor t or HomeCreditRepor t.
How can it do this without a reference? I certainly don't want to
reference Project 1 from project 2 ( although I tried that and the
reflection did not work). See code below

Any advise here would be greatly appreciated.

PROJECT 1

Public MustInherit Class CreditReport
Public objCredit As New Credit()

Public Function RequestReport(B yVal str As string) As Double

Blah,blah, blah
Return somedouble

End Function

Public Function GetReportSummar y(ByVal str1 As string) As
Credit
Blah,blah, blah

Return somecredit
End Function

Public MustOverride Sub ChoicePointPars er(ByVal str3 As
String)
Public MustOverride Function ValidateCreditR equest(ByVal str4
As string) As String

End Class
Public Class CreditFactory

Private Sub New()

End Sub

Public Shared Function Create(ByVal reportType As String) As
CreditReport
Dim credreport As CreditReport
credreport = Nothing
Dim typ As System.Type = System.Type.Get Type(reportType )
credreport = CType(Activator .CreateInstance (typ),
CreditReport)
Return credreport
End Function

End Class
PROJECT 2

Public Class BoatCreditRepor t
Inherits CreditReport

Public Overrides Sub ChoicePointPars er(ByVal str3 As String)
'parsing code specific to boat credit report
End Sub

Public Overrides Function ValidateCreditR equest(ByVal str4 As
string) As String
'validation code specific to boat credit report

End Function

End Class
PROJECT 3

Public Class HomeCreditRepor t
Inherits CreditReport

Public Overrides Sub ChoicePointPars er(ByVal str3 As String)
'parsing code specific to Home credit report
End Sub

Public Overrides Function ValidateCreditR equest(ByVal str4 As
string) As String
'validation code specific to Home credit report

End Function

End Class

[Mattias Sjögren]

I have a CreditFactory class which uses reflection to instantiate the
approprite subclass( BoatCreditRepor t, HomeCreditRepor t, etc) based on
some parm passed in.
The parm passed in will be a fully qualified class name pulled from
the web.config. No problem there.

If you include the assembly name after the class name (in the format
"Namespace.Clas s, AssemblyName"), then Type.GetType() will load the
assembly, so you don't need a compile time reference to it.

Mattias

--
Mattias Sjögren [MVP] mattias @ mvps.org
http://www.msjogren.net/dotnet/ | http://www.dotnetinterop.com
Please reply only to the newsgroup.

[Nancy]

Mattias Sjögren <ma************ ********@mvps.o rg> wrote in message news:<eu******* *******@TK2MSFT NGP12.phx.gbl>. ..

I have a CreditFactory class which uses reflection to instantiate the
approprite subclass( BoatCreditRepor t, HomeCreditRepor t, etc) based on
some parm passed in.
The parm passed in will be a fully qualified class name pulled from
the web.config. No problem there.

If you include the assembly name after the class name (in the format
"Namespace.Clas s, AssemblyName"), then Type.GetType() will load the
assembly, so you don't need a compile time reference to it.

Mattias

Thanks that worked out great