DisposeIfDisposable()

I work primarily with HPE RM, and most of the the objects within its SDK needed to be Disposed (otherwise horrible memory related errors), prior to version 8.2 of RM.

So, lots of code like:

Record record = null;
try
{
	record = new Record(trimDb, uri);
	//record code stuff
}
catch(Exception)
{
	// error handling
}
finally
{
	if(record != null)
	{
		record.Dispose();
	}
}

Or, the nicer using shortcut:

using (var record = new Record(trimDb, uri)) {
   // code that uses record
}

This all works because Record implements IDisposable. However, HPE RM 8.2 came along, and most objects no longer needed to be Disposed (which is a very good thing) and as such they no longer implemented IDisposable, which broke all the code shown above (not so good).

So, to make cross-version compatible code, I made the object extension, DisposeIfDisposable:

public static void DisposeIfDisposable(this object obj)
{
	if(obj is IDisposable)
	{
		((IDisposable)obj).Dispose();
	}
}

This extension will add a new DisposeIfDisposable() method to every object, and if that object is not null (null is IDisposable returns false), and implements IDisposable, it will be Disposed.

I had to give up using using, which was sad. My cross-version-compatible code now looks like:

Record record = null;
try
{
	record = new Record(trimDb, uri);
	//record code stuff
}
catch(Exception)
{
	// error handling
}
finally
{
	record.DisposeIfDisposable();
}	

Hopefully that’s of use to someone else other than me!

Matt.