Getting Nested Object Property Value Using Reflection

Question

I have the following two classes:

public class Address
{
    public string AddressLine1 { get; set; }
    public string AddressLine2 { get; set; }
    public string City { get; set; }
    public string State { get; set; }
    public string Zip { get; set; }
}

public class Employee
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string MiddleName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public Address EmployeeAddress { get; set; }
}

I have an instance of the employee class as follows:

    var emp1Address = new Address();
    emp1Address.AddressLine1 = "Microsoft Corporation";
    emp1Address.AddressLine2 = "One Microsoft Way";
    emp1Address.City = "Redmond";
    emp1Address.State = "WA";
    emp1Address.Zip = "98052-6399";

    var emp1 = new Employee();
    emp1.FirstName = "Bill";
    emp1.LastName = "Gates";
    emp1.EmployeeAddress = emp1Address;

I have a method which gets the property value based on the property name as follows:

public object GetPropertyValue(object obj ,string propertyName)
{
    var objType = obj.GetType();
    var prop = objType.GetProperty(propertyName);

    return prop.GetValue(obj, null);
}

The above method works fine for calls like GetPropertyValue(emp1, "FirstName") but if I try GetPropertyValue(emp1, "Address.AddressLine1") it throws an exception because objType.GetProperty(propertyName); is not able to locate the nested object property value. Is there a way to fix this?

Answer 1

var address = GetPropertyValue(GetPropertyValue(emp1, "Address"), "AddressLine1");

Object Employee doesn't have a single property named "Address.AddressLine1", it has a property named "Address", which itself has a property named "AddressLine1".