Question

in class Person i have relation to class Position, and the class Position has a relation to class PositionTitle, and the PositionTitle has a property named Title

public class Person
{
   public Position Position{get;set;}
}

public class Position
{
   public PositionTitle PositionTitle{get;set;}
}

public class PositionTitle 
{
   public string Title{get;set;}
}

i have a string “Person.Position.PositionTitle.Title”, how can i get this property of person with this string??

Answer 1

You’ll need to split the string by dots, and then use reflection to get each property by name. You can get the type of the property using PropertyInfo.PropertyType – then use that to fetch the next property in the chain. Something like this:

public object GetProperty(object source, string path)
{
    string[] bits = path.Split('.');
    Type type = source.GetType(); // Or pass this in
    object result = source;
    foreach (string bit in bits)
    {
        PropertyInfo prop = type.GetProperty(bit);
        type = prop.PropertyType;
        result = prop.GetValue(result, null);
    }
    return result;
}

You may well want to tweak this for binding flags etc, but it’s the right basic idea.