Question

I would like to know how to map a list with ‘keyvaluepair’ including properties to an object.
Would be nice to resolve it with AutoMapper, but any suggestions would be very kind.

Here’s how I would like it to work with FooBar that got properties and a list of key/values that depending on the properties matching with FooBars properties should be mapped:

// AutoMapper
var mappedFooBar = Mapper.Map<IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string, object>> FooBar>(fooBar);

I have been struggling with this for a while now so any suggestions would be nice.
Also tried to map with reflection, but cannot seem to get it to work.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Here is a simple, straight-forward reflection solution. It doesn’t do type checking, etc., but it could be easily built in:

public void Map(IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string,object>> data, object target) 
{
    Type t = target.GetType();
    var publicProperties = t.GetProperties();
    var setters = from kp in data
                  let prop = publicProperties.SingleOrDefault(p => p.Name == kp.Key)
                  where prop != null && prop.CanWrite
                  select new { prop, kp.Value };
    foreach(var setter in setters) 
    {
        setter.prop.SetValue(target, setter.Value, null);
    }                 
}

Of course, you could create an AutoMapper ITypeConverter that uses this. If you already use AutoMapper, this might be a good idea to keep the code consistent.

Be aware that this reflection technique might be slow – if you need to map this often, caching the resolved setters per type will be beneficial to performance.