Question

I have a block of code that serializes a type into a Html tag.

Type t = typeof(T); // I pass <T> in as a paramter, where myObj is of type T
tagBuilder.Attributes.Add("class", t.Name);
foreach (PropertyInfo prop in t.GetProperties())
{
    object propValue = prop.GetValue(myObj, null);
    string stringValue = propValue != null ? propValue.ToString() : String.Empty;
    tagBuilder.Attributes.Add(prop.Name, stringValue);
}

This works great, except I want it to only do this for primitive types, like int, double, bool etc, and other types that aren’t primitive but can be serialized easily like string. I want it to ignore everything else like Lists & other custom types.

Can anyone suggest how I do this? Or do I need to specify the types I want to allow somewhere and switch on the property’s type to see if it’s allowed? That’s a little messy, so it’d be nice if I there was a tidier way.

Answer 1

You can use the property Type.IsPrimitive, but be carefull because there are some types that we can think that are primitives, but they aren´t, for example Decimal and String.

Edit 1: Added sample code

Here is a sample code:

if (t.IsPrimitive || t == typeof(Decimal) || t == typeof(String) || ... )
{
    // Is Primitive, or Decimal, or String
}

Edit 2: As @SLaks comments, there are other types that maybe you want to treat as primitives, too. I think that you´ll have to add this variations one by one.

Edit 3: IsPrimitive = (Boolean, Byte, SByte, Int16, UInt16, Int32, UInt32, Int64, UInt64, IntPtr, UIntPtr, Char, Double, and Single),
Anther Primitive-Like type to check (t == typeof(DateTime))