Question

I am creating a meta data class for a POCO object. I am adding the “CSVColumn” (from LINQToCSV) attribute to the meta data class. But when I run the program, it couldn’t find its attributes.

So I tested it using reflection,

Type t = typeof(Case);
PropertyInfo pi = t.GetProperty("ProviderId");  
//bool isReadOnly =  ReadOnlyAttribute.IsDefined(pi,typeof( ReadOnlyAttribute);
var attributes = pi.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(Case),true);

It acutally return nothing by calling the “GetCustomAttributes”.

What have I done wrong??

Below is the way I created metadata class.

One thing I don’t understand is, it works perfectly well with MVC validations. Wondering how does that retrieve the custom attributes???

This is the entityframework POCO object

public partial class Case
{
public string ProviderName { get; set; }        
public string ProviderId { get; set; }
}

Here I create a partial class of Case and metadata classes,

[MetadataType(typeof(CaseMetaData))]
public partial class Case
{
    public class CaseMetaData
    {

        [CsvColumn(Name = "ProviderName", FieldIndex = 1)]
        public string ProviderName { get; set; }

        [CsvColumn(Name = "ProviderID", FieldIndex = 2)]
        public string ProviderId { get; set; }

    }

}

Please someone can help me, much appreciated.

Cheers

Answer 1

typeof(Case) isn’t an attribute type.
You mean typeof(CsvColumnAttribute).

Also, standard Reflection isn’t aware of metadata classes.
You need to use AssociatedMetadataTypeTypeDescriptionProvider.

A good example can be found here