Question

I’ve written a class with a single static method that copies property values from one object to another. It doesn’t care what type each object is, only that they have identical properties. It does what I need, so I’m not engineering it further, but what improvements would you make?

Here’s the code:

public class ShallowCopy {     public static void Copy<From, To>(From from, To to)         where To : class         where From : class     {         Type toType = to.GetType();         foreach (var propertyInfo in from.GetType().GetProperties(BindingFlags.GetProperty | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance))         {             toType.GetProperty(propertyInfo.Name).SetValue(to, propertyInfo.GetValue(from, null), null);         }     } } 

I’m using it as follows:

EmployeeDTO dto = GetEmployeeDTO(); Employee employee = new Employee(); ShallowCopy.Copy(dto, employee); 

Answer 1

Are your DTOs serializable? I would expect so, in which case:

MemberInfo[] sm = FormatterServices.GetSerializableMembers(typeof(From)); object[] data = FormatterServices.GetObjectData(from, sm); FormatterServices.PopulateObjectMembers(to, sm, data); 

But note that I don’t really agree with this general approach. I would prefer a strong contract for copying on your DTOs that each DTO implements.