Question

I have a separate class for each of my database entities and when I create an object of my class to reference the properties of a class it returns a circular reference which contains properties of other entities too that are related via FK … to remove the circular reference I want to first make a copy of the object through “context proxy object” copy and then get the primitive, complex, arrayEnumerable types of that object and strip off these types from the object and then the object get returned by web service….

Answer 1

Sounds like a recursive shallow clone. I’ve used the following but only one level deep.

public static class EntityBaseExtensions
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Description:    Creates a non-recursive shallow copy of an entity, only including public instance properties decorated with ColumnAttribute.
    ///                 This will return an object without entity references.
    /// </summary>
    /// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>
    /// <param name="source"></param>
    /// <returns>A non-recursive shallow copy of a LINQ entity</returns>
    public static T ShallowClone<T>(this T source) where T : EntityBaseClass
    {
        // create an object to copy values into
        T destination = Activator.CreateInstance<T>();

        // get source and destination property infos for all public instance
        PropertyInfo[] sourcePropInfos = source.GetType().GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance);
        PropertyInfo[] destinationPropInfos = source.GetType().GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance);

        foreach (PropertyInfo sourcePropInfo in sourcePropInfos)
        {
            if (Attribute.GetCustomAttribute(sourcePropInfo, typeof(ColumnAttribute), false) != null)
            {
                PropertyInfo destPropInfo = destinationPropInfos.Where(pi => pi.Name == sourcePropInfo.Name).First();

                destPropInfo.SetValue(destination, sourcePropInfo.GetValue(source, null), null);
            }
        }

        return destination;
    }

}