WCF Read DataMember Name attribute.

Question

Hi Guys I have a very simple class called person.

public class Person{
   [DataMember(Name="MyName")]
   public string Name { get;set;}
}

If I try to serialize or de-serialize, everything works great. In the XML I can see a tag called "MyName" and in the object I see with the VS Intellisense a property called Name. What I need now is to acces, from the object, the serialized name of the property. For example, I can do this object.GetType().GetProperty("Name"); but if I try to do this object.GetType().GetProperty("MyName") the reflection says that the property does not exist. How I can read the serialized name of the property? Is there a way?

Answer 1

It seems that the only way is to access, using reflection, the attributes of the property in this way:

var att = myProperty.GetType().GetAttributes();
var attribute = property.GetCustomAttributes(false)[0] as DataMemberAttribute;
Console.WriteLine(attribute.Name);

This works on both, client and server, without the need of serialize and deserialize the object.