Getting properties using reflection

Question

I'm using reflection for getting some properties, and I'm having problems getting one when the GetValue(item,null) returns an object. I did:

foreach (var item in items)
{
   item.GetType().GetProperty("Site").GetValue(item,null)
}

Doing that, I got an object System.Data.Entity.DynamicProxies.Site . Debugging it, I can see all properties of that object, but I can't get it. For example, one property is: siteName , how can I get the value of that?

Answer 1

DynamicProxies generated by Entity Framework are descendants of your POCO classes. That is, you actually can access all properties if you upcast the result to POCO:

foreach (var item in items)
{
   YourNamespace.Site site = (YourNamespace.Site)item.GetType().GetProperty("Site").GetValue(item,null);
   Console.WriteLine(site.SiteName);
}

If you need to use reflection for some reason, this is also possible:

foreach (var item in items)
{
    PropertyInfo piSite = item.GetType().GetProperty("Site");
    object site = piSite.GetValue(item,null);
    PropertyInfo piSiteName = site.GetType().GetProperty("SiteName");
    object siteName = piSiteName.GetValue(site, null);
    Console.WriteLine(siteName);
}

Reflection is slow, so I would use TypeDescriptor if I do not know the Type in compile time:

PropertyDescriptor siteProperty = null;
PropertyDescriptor siteNameProperty = null;
foreach (var item in items)
{
    if (siteProperty == null) {
     PropertyDescriptorCollection itemProperties = TypeDescriptor.GetProperties(item);
        siteProperty = itemProperties["Site"];
    }
    object site = siteProperty.GetValue(item);
    if (siteNameProperty == null) {
     PropertyDescriptorCollection siteProperties = TypeDescriptor.GetProperties(site);
        siteNameProperty = siteProperties["SiteName"];
    }
    object siteName = siteNameProperty.GetValue(site);
    Console.WriteLine(siteName);
}