Question

I use some strongly-typed expressions that get serialized to allow my UI code to have strongly-typed sorting and searching expressions. These are of type Expression<Func<TModel,TProperty>> and are used as such: SortOption.Field = (p => p.FirstName);. I’ve gotten this working perfectly for this simple case.

The code that I’m using for parsing the “FirstName” property out of there is actually reusing some existing functionality in a third-party product that we use and it works great, until we start working with deeply-nested properties(SortOption.Field = (p => p.Address.State.Abbreviation);). This code has some very different assumptions in the need to support deeply-nested properties.

As for what this code does, I don’t really understand it and rather than changing that code, I figured I should just write from scratch this functionality. However, I don’t know of a good way to do this. I suspect we can do something better than doing a ToString() and performing string parsing. So what’s a good way to do this to handle the trivial and deeply-nested cases?

Requirements:

• Given the expression p => p.FirstName I need a string of "FirstName".
• Given the expression p => p.Address.State.Abbreviation I need a string of "Address.State.Abbreviation"

---

While it’s not important for an answer to my question, I suspect my serialization/deserialization code could be useful to somebody else who finds this question in the future, so it is below. Again, this code is not important to the question – I just thought it might help somebody. Note that DynamicExpression.ParseLambda comes from the Dynamic LINQ stuff and Property.PropertyToString() is what this question is about.

/// <summary>
/// This defines a framework to pass, across serialized tiers, sorting logic to be performed.
/// </summary>
/// <typeparam name="TModel">This is the object type that you are filtering.</typeparam>
/// <typeparam name="TProperty">This is the property on the object that you are filtering.</typeparam>
[Serializable]
public class SortOption<TModel, TProperty> : ISerializable where TModel : class
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Convenience constructor.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="property">The property to sort.</param>
    /// <param name="isAscending">Indicates if the sorting should be ascending or descending</param>
    /// <param name="priority">Indicates the sorting priority where 0 is a higher priority than 10.</param>
    public SortOption(Expression<Func<TModel, TProperty>> property, bool isAscending = true, int priority = 0)
    {
        Property = property;
        IsAscending = isAscending;
        Priority = priority;
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Default Constructor.
    /// </summary>
    public SortOption()
        : this(null)
    {
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// This is the field on the object to filter.
    /// </summary>
    public Expression<Func<TModel, TProperty>> Property { get; set; }

    /// <summary>
    /// This indicates if the sorting should be ascending or descending.
    /// </summary>
    public bool IsAscending { get; set; }

    /// <summary>
    /// This indicates the sorting priority where 0 is a higher priority than 10.
    /// </summary>
    public int Priority { get; set; }

    #region Implementation of ISerializable

    /// <summary>
    /// This is the constructor called when deserializing a SortOption.
    /// </summary>
    protected SortOption(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
    {
        IsAscending = info.GetBoolean("IsAscending");
        Priority = info.GetInt32("Priority");

        // We just persisted this by the PropertyName. So let's rebuild the Lambda Expression from that.
        Property = DynamicExpression.ParseLambda<TModel, TProperty>(info.GetString("Property"), default(TModel), default(TProperty));
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Populates a <see cref="T:System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo"/> with the data needed to serialize the target object.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="info">The <see cref="T:System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo"/> to populate with data. </param>
    /// <param name="context">The destination (see <see cref="T:System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext"/>) for this serialization. </param>
    public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
    {
        // Just stick the property name in there. We'll rebuild the expression based on that on the other end.
        info.AddValue("Property", Property.PropertyToString());
        info.AddValue("IsAscending", IsAscending);
        info.AddValue("Priority", Priority);
    }

    #endregion
}

Answer 1

Here’s the trick: any expression of this form…

obj => obj.A.B.C // etc.

…is really just a bunch of nested MemberExpression objects.

First you’ve got:

MemberExpression: obj.A.B.C
Expression:       obj.A.B   // MemberExpression
Member:           C

Evaluating Expression above as a MemberExpression gives you:

MemberExpression: obj.A.B
Expression:       obj.A     // MemberExpression
Member:           B

Finally, above that (at the “top”) you have:

MemberExpression: obj.A
Expression:       obj       // note: not a MemberExpression
Member:           A

So it seems clear that the way to approach this problem is by checking the Expression property of a MemberExpression up until the point where it is no longer itself a MemberExpression.

---

UPDATE: It seems there is an added spin on your problem. It may be that you have some lambda that looks like a Func<T, int>…

p => p.Age

…but is actually a Func<T, object>; in this case, the compiler will convert the above expression to:

p => Convert(p.Age)

Adjusting for this issue actually isn’t as tough as it might seem. Take a look at my updated code for one way to deal with it. Notice that by abstracting the code for getting a MemberExpression away into its own method (TryFindMemberExpression), this approach keeps the GetFullPropertyName method fairly clean and allows you to add additional checks in the future — if, perhaps, you find yourself facing a new scenario which you hadn’t originally accounted for — without having to wade through too much code.

---

To illustrate: this code worked for me.

// code adjusted to prevent horizontal overflow
static string GetFullPropertyName<T, TProperty>
(Expression<Func<T, TProperty>> exp)
{
    MemberExpression memberExp;
    if (!TryFindMemberExpression(exp.Body, out memberExp))
        return string.Empty;

    var memberNames = new Stack<string>();
    do
    {
        memberNames.Push(memberExp.Member.Name);
    }
    while (TryFindMemberExpression(memberExp.Expression, out memberExp));

    return string.Join(".", memberNames.ToArray());
}

// code adjusted to prevent horizontal overflow
private static bool TryFindMemberExpression
(Expression exp, out MemberExpression memberExp)
{
    memberExp = exp as MemberExpression;
    if (memberExp != null)
    {
        // heyo! that was easy enough
        return true;
    }

    // if the compiler created an automatic conversion,
    // it'll look something like...
    // obj => Convert(obj.Property) [e.g., int -> object]
    // OR:
    // obj => ConvertChecked(obj.Property) [e.g., int -> long]
    // ...which are the cases checked in IsConversion
    if (IsConversion(exp) && exp is UnaryExpression)
    {
        memberExp = ((UnaryExpression)exp).Operand as MemberExpression;
        if (memberExp != null)
        {
            return true;
        }
    }

    return false;
}

private static bool IsConversion(Expression exp)
{
    return (
        exp.NodeType == ExpressionType.Convert ||
        exp.NodeType == ExpressionType.ConvertChecked
    );
}

Usage:

Expression<Func<Person, string>> simpleExp = p => p.FirstName;
Expression<Func<Person, string>> complexExp = p => p.Address.State.Abbreviation;
Expression<Func<Person, object>> ageExp = p => p.Age;

Console.WriteLine(GetFullPropertyName(simpleExp));
Console.WriteLine(GetFullPropertyName(complexExp));
Console.WriteLine(GetFullPropertyName(ageExp));

Output:

FirstName
Address.State.Abbreviation
Age