Question

Is it possible to get the parent object from a child object dynamically? Essentially, all I’m trying to accomplish is to dynamically retrieve the value of a property belonging to a child objects’ parent. For example, something along the lines of the following:

public T GetParentProperty<T>(object oChildObject, string sPropertyName)
{
    ??? oOwner;
    PropertyInfo oOwnerInfo;
    T oPropertyValue;

    try
    {
        oPropertyValue = null;
        if (oChildObject != null)
        {
            oOwner = oChildObject.GetType().???;
            oOwnerInfo = oOwner.GetType().GetProperty(sPropertyName);
            if (oOwnerInfo != null)
                oPropertyValue = oOwnerInfo.GetValue(oOwner, null) as T;
        }
    }
    catch(Exception oEx)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(oEx);
    }

    return oPropertyValue;
}

Many thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Assuming you mean “Parent” as in the class that your child inherits from, you can use the BaseType property of the Type Class. If the BaseType property doesn’t return exactly what you need, then you can look through the list of members at that link, and find the one that does. This is what you code example appears to be attempting.

Unfortunately, if you mean “Parent” as in the class that owns the reference to your child type, I don’t think this can be done.

I’m wondering why you need this functionality though, as it is a strange need.