Last time I looked at how IronPython is integrated with .NET which makes it possible to use all of the good stuff that we know and love from .NET. The obvious next thing to look at is doing the inverse and see how it is possible to run IronPython code from within a .NET app written in this case in C#.
The main scenario for this is to allow advanced users to write their own scripts that can extend the behavior of the application, or allow them to express complex logic. An example that comes to mind for me is a system I am working on at work, where we are doing payroll processing for any kind of company. Here a viable option could be to allow the rules for the processing to be expressed with scripts – since the tax laws have a tendency to change frequently it would be a valuable extensibility point.
The most basic way to run IronPython code from C# is to do like this:
var engine = new PythonEngine();
engine.ExecuteToConsole(@"print ""Sweet dude!""");
As you can see it is pretty simple to get code to run in the first place. It is not of much use however if it is not possible to pass in variables to the context in which the IronPython code is run. This is accomplished by passing in a module and a dictionary of variables like so:
engine.ExecuteToConsole(@"print ""Cool: "" + str(2+val)",
engine.DefaultModule, new Dictionary<string, object>() { { "val", 6 } });
Again, this is pretty straight forward. Besides passing variables it would also be nice to be able to define global variables that can be used and accessed again after the script is run. This example shows how to do just that:
engine.DefaultModule.Globals["val"] = 6;
engine.ExecuteToConsole(@"val = ""Cool: "" + str(2+val+2)", engine.DefaultModule, null);
string modifiedValue = (string)engine.DefaultModule.Globals["val"];
One thing to note here is that i set the global variable to a value of 6 which is an integer but I end up getting a string back. This is because IronPython is a dynamic language which allows the type to be changed which is done in the script because it is added with a string.
Now my guess is you might be thinking that there must be other ways to run scripts than to execute them to a console. Well of course there is. The PythonEngine has several overloads and alternate methods that can be used to run scripts. I wont go over them all but I’ll finish up with a sample that I think will probably be one of the ways I will end up using most often. In this case I simply evaluate a script that returns a value. This way a script could be used to define some logic and simply return the kind of result I need:
string myResult = engine.EvaluateAs<string>(@"str(2+2)");
Mainly there are two groups of methods to run IronPython code – you can either execute or evaluate the code, with the difference being that evaluating it returnes a value. There are also methods to execute code from a file, which might be convenient.
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