C# Attributes and their uses

Question

I really don't know much about attributes in general in C#, I've seen them in use in a lot of different ways/places but I don't think I see the importance of some of them. Some definitely have importance because they provide a noticeable function, such as [Serializable]. Yet, others don't seem so important, such as one my coworker uses to mark properties with [DataMember].

I suppose my question is, what are attributes and how are they useful? Is there a way to create my own attributes and how can I tell if fields/methods/classes/whatever have particular attributes or what values are set in those attributes?

Answer 1

I think the answer to the following question will provide you some insight to your questions.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2676603/how-do-attribute-classes-work/2677153#2677153

Here is a repost of the answer I provided.

Attributes are essentially meta data that can be attached to various pieces of your code. This meta data can then be interogate and affect the behaviour of certain opperations.

Attributes can be applied to almost every aspect of your code. For example, attributes can be associated at the Assembly level, like the AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion attributes, which govern the version numbers associated with the assembly.

[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.0.0")]
[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.0.0.0")]

Then the Serializable attribute for example can be applied to a type declaration to flag the type as supporting serialization. In fact this attribute has special meaning within the CLR and is actually stored as a special directive directly on the type in the IL, this is optimized to be stored as a bit flag which can be processed much more efficiently, there are a few attributes on this nature, which are known as pseudo custom attributes.

Still other attributes can be applied to methods, properties, fields, enums, return values etc. You can get an idea of the possible targets an attribute can be applied to by looking at this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.attributetargets(VS.90).aspx

Further to this, you can define your own custom attributes which can then be applied to the applicable targets that your attributes are intended for. Then at runtime your code could reflect on the values contained in the custom attributes and take appropriate actions.

For a rather naive example, and this is just for the sake of example :) You might want to write a persistence engine that will automatically map Classes to tables in your database and map the properties of the Class to table columns. You could start with defining two custom attributes

TableMappingAttribute
ColumnMappingAttribute

Which you can then apply to your classes, as an example we have a Person class

[TableMapping("People")]
public class Person
{
  [ColumnMapping("fname")]
  public string FirstName {get; set;}

  [ColumnMapping("lname")]
  public string LastName {get; set;}
}

When this compiles, other than the fact that the compiler emits the additional meta data defined by the custom attributes, little else is impacted. However you can now write a PersistanceManager that can dynamically inspect the attributes of an instance of the Person class and insert the data into the People table, mapping the data in the FirstName property to the fname column and the LastName property to the lname column.

As to your question regarding the instances of the attributes, the instance of the attribute is not created for each instance of your Class. All instances of People will share the same instance of the TableMappingAttribute and ColumnMappingAttributes. In fact, the attribute instances are only created when you actually query for the attributes the first time.

Answer 2

Attributes are a means by which you can associate metadata with types in .NET. This allows you to check for a type and get information about it that's separate from the "runtime" information of the type.

This can be very useful. You mentioned [Serializable], but other simple examples include many of the System.ComponentModel types, such as Description, which is used by the property grid to "describe" properties when you work with them in the designer. Since the "description" of a property isn't really related to the behavior of the type in a program (at runtime), it doesn't belong in the class. However, it's very handy when you go to edit a control in a visual designer, for example, to see a description (or category, etc) of a property. Attributes are the means by which this is handled.

Answer 3

C# provides a mechanism for defining declarative tags, called attributes, which you can place on certain entities in your source code to specify additional information. The information that attributes contain can be retrieved at run time through reflection. You can use predefined attributes or you can define your own custom attributes.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa288059%28v=VS.71%29.aspx

Answer 4

what are attributes?

Attributes enable you to embed information about a type or method in the metadata which describes that type or method.

You typically want to use attributes to describe facts about the mechanism of the type or method rather than the meaning of the type or method. For example, suppose you have a type Employee. A fact about the meaning of Employee is that it is a kind of Person, that an Employee has a Manager, and so on. A fact about the mechanism of Employee is that it can be the target of data binding, or it can be serialized to disk, or whatever. An employee cannot be serialized to disk, but the class Employee can be. Attributes let you separate information about the technical details from the semantic model.

Is there a way to create my own attributes?

Yes. Create a class which extends Attribute. By convention you want to name it "FooAttribute". If you do so you can use either the [Foo] syntax or the [FooAttribute] syntax at your discretion.

How can I tell if fields/methods/classes/whatever have particular attributes or what values are set in those attributes?

Use the GetCustomAttributes method on the reflection objects.

Where should I read for more information?

Start with the attributes tutorial:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa288454(VS.71).aspx

And then read all of chapter 17 of the C# specification.