Question

I need an instance of class/model(for the purpose of accessing a non-static member) within my custom attribute.

public class LoginModel
{
     [AutoComplete(currentInstance)]  //pass instance of class or CompanyNames
     public string DepartmentName { get; set; }


     public string[] DepartmentNames { get {...} }
}

Is there a way to do this without using new() or Reflection.

Answer 1

That’s totally impossible. Attributes are baked into the metadata of the assembly at compile-time so talking about passing an instance of a class to an attribute doesn’t make any sense because instances exist only at runtime.

On the other hand attributes are always consumed by reflection, so I guess that at the moment you are checking for the presence of this custom attribute on the class metadata you could use the the instance.