Determine Class Associations using Reflection

Question

I am working on a solution that extracts all the class associations between each other. If we click a class in the object browser we can see the option Find All References. I want something similar that finds the associations a class has to other classes. How can we find them using Reflection?

I am interested in Extracting

1. Composition Relationship:
2. Aggregation Relationship
3. Association Relationship
4. Inheritance

Answer 1

You can use Reflection in order to list all properties, fields and methods (and more) of a class. You would have to inspect these and determine their types and parameter lists. Probably it would be a good idea to discard types from the System namespace.

Type t = typeof(MyClass);

// Determine from which type a class inherits
Type baseType = t.BaseType;

// Determine which interfaces a class implements
Type[] interfaces = t.GetInterfaces();

// Get fields, properties and methods
const BindingFlags bindingFlags =
    BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic;
FieldInfo[] fields = t.GetFields(bindingFlags);
PropertyInfo[] properties = t.GetProperties(bindingFlags);
MethodInfo[] methods = t.GetMethods(bindingFlags);

foreach (var method in methods) {
    // Get method parameters
    ParameterInfo[] parameters = method.GetParameters();
}

Intellisense will tell you (almost) all the secrets of FieldInfo, PropertyInfo, MethodInfo and ParameterInfo. You might also consider examining the generic parameters of the class, events and more.