Question

I have a class containing several properties (all are strings if it makes any difference).
I also have a list, which contains many different instances of the class.

While creating some unit tests for my classes I decided I wanted to loop through each object in the list and then loop through each property of that object…

I thought doing this would be as simple as…

foreach (Object obj in theList)
{
     foreach (Property theProperties in obj)
     {
         do some stufff!!;
     }
}

But this didnt work! 🙁
I get this error…

“foreach statement cannot operate on variables of type ‘Application.Object’ because ‘Application.Object’ does not contain a public definition for ‘GetEnumerator'”

Does anyone know of a way of doing this without tons of ifs and loops or without getting into anything too complex?

Answer 1

Give this a try:

foreach (PropertyInfo propertyInfo in obj.GetType().GetProperties())
{
   // do stuff here
}

Also please note that Type.GetProperties() has an overload which accepts a set of binding flags so you can filter out properties on a different criteria like accessibility level, see MSDN for more details: Type.GetProperties Method (BindingFlags) Last but not least don’t forget to add the “system.Reflection” assembly reference.

For instance to resolve all public properties:

foreach (var propertyInfo in obj.GetType()
                                .GetProperties(
                                        BindingFlags.Public 
                                        | BindingFlags.Instance))
{
   // do stuff here
}

Please let me know whether this works as expected.