how to find a generic UI class in a list of different class without specifying the type?

Question

I made a generic UI class called DraggableLayout. It's a treelike Layout that nest within other DraggableLayout

The thing is, I need the children to be able to search for the DraggableLayout when I am looping through the list of Controls in parents.

        foreach (var tab in Parents)
        {
            if (tab is DraggableLayout) //Error CS0305
            {
               //Do Something
            }
        }

When I do the above, I need to specifiy the type. Is it possible to ignore the and search for a parent generic class ?

Answer 1

What you can do is:

var tabType = tab.GetType();
if (tabType.IsGenericType
    && typeof(DraggableLayout<>)
        .IsAssignableFrom(tabType.GetGenericTypeDefinition()))
{ ... }

Or with an extension method:

public static bool IsOfGenericType(this Type source, Type genericType)
{
    return source.IsGenericType
        && genericType.IsAssignableFrom(source.GetGenericTypeDefinition());
}

// ...
if (typeof(tab).IsOfGenericType(typeof(DraggableLayout<>)))
{ ... }