Question

Okay, so I want to have a generic method that can read data from an unknown data class given a razor type property pointer.

I.E. I want to be able to pass in a string containing a template and a object and then extract the data from the object given the string in the template.

String template = "@Model.Basket";
var results = parse(template, data);

the parse method should have no knowledge of the specific model being passed to it, so its method signature should be something like:

public var parse(String template, object model)

where data is something like

public class Receipt
{
    public String Firstname { get; set; }
    public String Surname { get; set; }
    public DateTime TransactionDateTime { get; set; }
    public Boolean ReturnCustomer { get; set; }
    public LineItem[] Basket { get; set; }


    public class LineItem
    {
        public Product product { get; set; }
        public int Units { get; set; }

        public class Product
        {
            public int ProductId { get; set; }
            public String ProductName { get; set; }
            public double Cost { get; set; }
        }
    }
}

In this case parse should return an array of line items, but if my template was equal to “@Model.Firstname” it should simply return a string containing the the name stored in that property.

Does anyone have any good ideas.

Note that for this given solution, I can not make use of the Razor engine as my templates are not in a format that the razor engine can understand.

Answer 1

If you want to do this, you want to look at the System.Reflection namespace – in particular, PropertyInfo. I’m not sure that it is a good idea, though.