Question

I have a method that takes as an input parameter an object of type IEnumerable. I want to enumerate the enumeration and for each item use reflection to get the value for each property.

I have the following code:

protected void WriteData(IEnumerable data)
{
    var enumerationTypeInfo = data.GetType();
    var itemTypeInfo = enumerationTypeInfo.GetElementType();

    ...
}

The problem is enumerationTypeInfo.GetElementType() always returns null. In particular, I’m passing in a List<Entry> into WriteData, where Entry is a class I created. When I use the debugger and set a breakpoint I can see that enumerationTypeInfo correctly shows that it’s a List of type Entry, but why does GetElementType return null?

Thanks

Answer 1

GetElementType is for use with arrays, not other generic classes. To get a generic type’s generic parameters, you can use Type.GetGenericArguments.