How do you get a C# property name as a string with reflection?

Question

I'm looking for a way to get a property name as a string so I can have a "strongly-typed" magic string. What I need to do is something like MyClass.SomeProperty.GetName() that would return "SomeProperty". Is this possible in C#?

Answer 1

You can use Expressions to achieve this quite easily. See this blog for a sample.

This makes it so you can create an expression via a lambda, and pull out the name. For example, implementing INotifyPropertyChanged can be reworked to do something like:

public int MyProperty {
    get { return myProperty; }
    set
    {
        myProperty = value;
        RaisePropertyChanged( () => MyProperty );
    }
}

In order to map your equivalent, using the referenced "Reflect" class, you'd do something like:

string propertyName = Reflect.GetProperty(() => SomeProperty).Name;

Viola - property names without magic strings.

Answer 2

You can get a list of properties of an object using reflection.

MyClass o;

PropertyInfo[] properties = o.GetType().GetProperties(
    BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance
);

Each Property has a Name attribute which would get you "SomeProperty"