Question

So I got this crazy idea I could make make something cool work. I got tired of new selectlist(item, “blah”, “blahblah”) so I started writing an extension method (trying to get it more strongly typed) something like this …

var selectList = projects.ToSelectList(p =>p.ProjectID, p =>p.ProjectName);

the extension method goes a little like this

public static SelectList ToSelectList<T>(this IEnumerable<T> item, 
                           Expression<Func<T, string>> textName, 
                           Expression<Func<T, string>> valueProperty)
    {
        //do cool stuff
        return new SelectList(items, dataTextField, dataValueField);
    }

What I need to get to is the reflection properties so I can grab the value and grab the name. Any ideas onhow I can do that? Any thoughts on doing this more better/easier? I’ve done this before but for the life of me I can’t remember how I did it.

Edit this needed some clarification. I copied some code that was in-flight and not refined, so I’ve updated that code to reflect the more correct criteria.

Answer 1

I don’t see why you have to use Reflection to do this.

public static SelectList ToSelectListItem<T>(this IEnumerable<T> items, 
    Func<T, string> textName, Func<T, string> valueProperty) {
    {
    return new SelectList(items
            .Select(i => new SelectListItem {Text = textName(i), Value = valueProperty(i)}));
    }
}

should would work, but I don’t have the MVC dll on the current machine.