Question

I have many classes that are stored in lists. I’m attempting to create a method that accepts a List as a generic type and returns the contents of every element within in the appropriate list as a string.

This is a sample of one of many classes. This would be defined as List<Player>:

public class Player
{
    public int PlayerId { get; set; }
    public string PlayerName { get; set; }
    public string FavoriteThing { get; set; }
}

I’m still struggling to get the syntax correct here:

  public static string GetStringOfData<T>(List<T> data)
    {
        string dataString = string.Empty;
        var type = data.GetType();

        // Insert magic here to get values for PlayerId, PlayerName, etc...

        return dataString;
    }

How can we make this happen? I’m using C# 4.0.

Updates
The classes I’m using are generated from an edmx model, connecting to a database. This is for a reporting tool that will parse various tables and report errors to a user via email. The users have specifically requested the ability to see the contents of all fields.

Answer 1

You should be able to do the following:

        foreach(T item in data)
        {
            var props = item.GetType().GetProperties();
            foreach(var prop in props)
            {   
                dataString += prop.GetValue(item, null);
            }
        }