mijay / NClone

NClone - generic implementation of deep copy for arbitrary .NET objects

NClone - is production-ready implementation of deep copy of arbitrary .NET objects. Inspired by lazy people, who are tired of implementing ICloneable interface manually.

Features

NClone is:

1. Easy to use. You need just one line of code to do all 'dirty job' of cloning — forget boilerplate ICloneable.Clone implementations like a bad dream:

   var clone = Clone.ObjectGraph(obj);

2. Fast. NClone uses lightweight code generation in CIL instead of reflection, which gives significant (5-20x) speedup. Employed smart caching guarantees that every work will be done at most once.

3. Customizable. You can use CustomReplicationBehavior attribute to tell NClone, which types or type members should be skipped (or shallow copied) during cloning. For deeper customization NClone contain more extension points.

4. Smart. NClone knows that (in most of the cases): structures are immutable; event subscribers should not be cloned (and even copied) while cloning object instance; cloning lazy objects is bad-practice; etc…

How to use NClone

In most of the cases the only thing you need to do is:

1. Install NClone NuGet package.
2. Use static method Clone.ObjectGraph<T>(T source) from NClone namespace for cloning.
3. If you need to change how NClone processes some types or type members during cloning, apply CustomReplicationBehaviorAttribute to them.

If you need more extensibility, consider using a new instance of ObjectReplicator class with your own custom implementation of IMetadataProvider interface.

Known issues

NClone currently does not support cloning of cyclic object graphs and multi-dimensional arrays.