Question

My basic need is to get the datatypes from an anonymous type generated from a LINQ to SQL query.

I have a piece of code (cleverer than I could write, since I haven’t really delved into reflection) which returns the datatypes from an anonymous types, and works perfectly for the elements marked ‘not nullable’ in the linq2sql properties. So, if I have a string it will return as System.String. However, when the element is nullable I end up with the ‘full name’ of it being:

{Name = “Nullable1" FullName = "System.Nullable1[[System.Decimal, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089]]”}

All I want to extract is the System.Decimal type in such a case (and in cases of strings or whatever, I’d just want System.String). I’ve looked through the properties and can’t find anything that seems to store this.

    private static Dictionary<string, Type> GetFieldsForType<T>(IEnumerable<T> data)
    {
        object o = data.First();

        var properties = o.GetType().GetProperties();

        return properties.ToDictionary(property => property.Name, property => property.PropertyType);
    }

The LINQ query (which I don’t think really matters here):

var theData = from r in db.tblTestEdits select new { myitem = r.textField, mydecimal = r.decimalField }; 

I found this link that seems to try to address a similar thing.
http://ysgitdiary.blogspot.com/2010/02/blog-post.html

Though it seems to return a “string” of what the type is rather than the actual type, which is what I need. Not sure how to convert such a thing.

Many thanks all.

Answer 1

private static Type GetCoreType(Type type)
{
    if (type.IsGenericType &&
        type.GetGenericTypeDefinition() == typeof(Nullable<>))
        return Nullable.GetUnderlyingType(type);
    else
        return type;
}