Hello, I am also a smarmy software engineer. What's that? You have a simple question about how to do X thing?

Don't do X thing. Let me link you to my blog post titled "x thing considered harmful." The fact that you are even asking about how to do X thing makes it obvious to me that what you really need to do is throw away your entire project and rearchitect it from scratch, because if you need to do X thing, that's a code smell baby. You're working with garbage and you're garbage at programming.