I recently was working on a library to manage reports in an application (probably a good candidate for an open source project) and needed to be able to grab the value of a property on an object by name without knowing if that property existed or not. Of course .NET reflection comes in handy for doing this, and this is the easy wrapper code I came up with. Just add this to any class to query for the existence of a property or to retrieve its value as a string. There's way more you can do with reflection, but this wraps up at least some of the basics.
''' <summary>
''' Indicates if a property exists on this object by name
''' </summary>
''' <param name="PropertyName">The CASE SENSITIVE name of the property on this object</param>
Public Function PropertyExistsByName(ByVal PropertyName As String) As Boolean
Try
Return Me.GetType().GetProperty(PropertyName) IsNot Nothing
Catch ex As Exception
Return False
End Try
End Function
''' <summary>
''' Returns the value of a public property on this object by name
''' </summary>
''' <param name="PropertyName">The CASE SENSITIVE name of the property on this object</param>
''' <param name="ReturnIfNotFound">What to return if the property is found not to exist or if there is an error.</param>
Public Function GetPropertyValueByName(ByVal PropertyName As String, Optional ByVal ReturnIfNotFound As String = "") As String
Try
If PropertyExistsByName(PropertyName) Then
Return Me.GetType().GetProperty(PropertyName).GetValue(Me, Nothing).ToString
Else
Return ReturnIfNotFound
End If
Catch ex As Exception
Return ReturnIfNotFound
End Try
End Function
this really works. thanks
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