Reflection: Get all subproperties

Question

I have a List that contains objects and each of these objects contains a lot of properties of several types, and each of these properties contains subproperties aswell.

I need to get all the properties via Reflection and store them in one PropertyInfo[] ...

Is this even possible with reflection? I really need to do it via reflection...

Answer 1

There is no such thing as "sub properties" - properties are of a certain type, can have values of a certain type (ie. a subclass of the property type), and that type can have properties of its own.

You can use recursion for this:

List<PropertyInfo> properties = new List<PropertyInfo>();
foreach (object obj in myList)
{
    properties.AddRange(GetDeepProperties(obj, ...));
}

PropertyInfo[] array = properties.ToArray();

...

IEnumerable<PropertyInfo> GetDeepProperties(object obj, BindingFlags flags)
{
    // Get properties of the current object
    foreach (PropertyInfo property in obj.GetType().GetProperties(flags))
    {
        yield return property;

        object propertyValue = property.GetValue(obj, null);
        if (propertyValue == null)
        {
            // Property is null, but can still get properties of the PropertyType
            foreach (PropertyInfo subProperty in property.PropertyType.GetProperties(flags))
            {
                yield return subProperty;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            // Get properties of the value assiged to the property
            foreach (PropertyInfo subProperty = GetDeepProperties(propertyValue))
            {
                yield return subProperty;
            }
        }
    }
}

The above code is just an example:

• I have not tried or even compiled it
• you'll get a StackOverflowException if somewhere in this "property tree" objects are pointing to eachother
• it misses null checks and exception handling (property getters can throw exceptions)
• it ignores the existence of indexed properties

I don't know what you want to do with this array - the reference to the object from which each PropertyInfo was created is lost, so you can't get or set their values anymore.