How can I use a Collection.ArrayList in my C# application and pass it to the MATLAB .NET component

I want to create an Collections.ArrayList in C# and pass it to a .NET component created with MATLAB Builder for .NET.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

You can use the ICollection.CopyTo method to make a shallow copy of the elements of the collection to a standard C# array. You can then cast this array to a MATLAB data type. Here is a simple exmple:

MATLAB code:

function ConsolePrinter(A)

disp(A)

C#-code:

using System;

using System.Collections;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

using MathWorks.MATLAB.NET.Arrays;

using ConsolePrinter;

namespace ConsoleApplication1

{

      class Program

      {

          static void Main(string[] args)

          {

              //Instanciate the MATLAB component

              ConsolePrinterclass Pr = new ConsolePrinterclass();            

              //Initialize and populate a Collections.ArrayList

                  ArrayList list1 = new ArrayList(5);

                  list1.Add("Jody");

                  list1.Add("Red");

                  list1.Add("John");

                  list1.Add("Xiaoyu");

                  list1.Add("Black");

              //Create shallow copy of the ArrayList alements to an array

                  string[] array1 = new string[5];

                  list1.CopyTo(array1, 0);

              //print container element to screen

                  foreach (string i in array1)

                  {

                      Console.WriteLine("Element as native C# array:\n" + "\t" + i);

                      Console.WriteLine("Element as MathWorks type from MCR:");

                      Pr.ConsolePrinter(new MWCellArray(i));

                  }

              //wait for user to exit

                  Console.ReadLine();               

              }

          }

      }

You may need to invoke IDisposible.Dispose method to garbage collect the collection.

This method will work for any of the System.Collections objects i.e. deque, queue, stack...