.net – How to get a Static property with Reflection

netreflectionstatic

So this seems pretty basic but I can't get it to work. I have an Object, and I am using reflection to get to it's public properties. One of these properties is static and I'm having no luck getting to it.

Public Function GetProp(ByRef obj As Object, ByVal propName as String) as PropertyInfo
    Return obj.GetType.GetProperty(propName)

End Function

The above code works fine for Public Instance properties, which up until now is all that I have needed. Supposedly I can use BindingFlags to request other types of properties (private, static), but I can't seem to find the right combination.

Public Function GetProp(ByRef obj As Object, ByVal propName as String) as PropertyInfo
    Return obj.GetType.GetProperty(propName, Reflection.BindingFlags.Static Or Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance Or Reflection.BindingFlags.Public)

End Function

But still, requesting any Static members return nothing. .NET reflector can see the static properties just fine, so clearly I am missing something here.

Best Answer

Or just look at this...

Type type = typeof(MyClass); // MyClass is static class with static properties
foreach (var p in type.GetProperties())
{
   var v = p.GetValue(null, null); // static classes cannot be instanced, so use null...
}

Related Solutions

Java – reflection and why is it useful

The name reflection is used to describe code which is able to inspect other code in the same system (or itself).

For example, say you have an object of an unknown type in Java, and you would like to call a 'doSomething' method on it if one exists. Java's static typing system isn't really designed to support this unless the object conforms to a known interface, but using reflection, your code can look at the object and find out if it has a method called 'doSomething' and then call it if you want to.

So, to give you a code example of this in Java (imagine the object in question is foo) :

Method method = foo.getClass().getMethod("doSomething", null);
method.invoke(foo, null);

One very common use case in Java is the usage with annotations. JUnit 4, for example, will use reflection to look through your classes for methods tagged with the @Test annotation, and will then call them when running the unit test.

There are some good reflection examples to get you started at http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/reflect/index.html

And finally, yes, the concepts are pretty much similar in other statically typed languages which support reflection (like C#). In dynamically typed languages, the use case described above is less necessary (since the compiler will allow any method to be called on any object, failing at runtime if it does not exist), but the second case of looking for methods which are marked or work in a certain way is still common.

Update from a comment:

The ability to inspect the code in the system and see object types is not reflection, but rather Type Introspection. Reflection is then the ability to make modifications at runtime by making use of introspection. The distinction is necessary here as some languages support introspection, but do not support reflection. One such example is C++

C# – How to get the path of the assembly the code is in

I've defined the following property as we use this often in unit testing.

public static string AssemblyDirectory
{
    get
    {
        string codeBase = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase;
        UriBuilder uri = new UriBuilder(codeBase);
        string path = Uri.UnescapeDataString(uri.Path);
        return Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
    }
}

The Assembly.Location property sometimes gives you some funny results when using NUnit (where assemblies run from a temporary folder), so I prefer to use CodeBase which gives you the path in URI format, then UriBuild.UnescapeDataString removes the File:// at the beginning, and GetDirectoryName changes it to the normal windows format.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Java – reflection and why is it useful

C# – How to get the path of the assembly the code is in

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