How do I get the member to which my custom attribute was applied?

Question

I'm creating a custom attribute in C# and I want to do different things based on whether the attribute is applied to a method versus a property. At first I was going to do new StackTrace().GetFrame(1).GetMethod() in my custom attribute constructor to see what method called the attribute constructor, but now I'm unsure what that will give me. What if the attribute was applied to a property? Would GetMethod() return a MethodBase instance for that property? Is there a different way of getting the member to which an attribute was applied in C#?

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method | AttributeTargets.Property,
    AllowMultiple = true)]
public class MyCustomAttribute : Attribute

Update: okay, I might have been asking the wrong question. From within a custom attribute class, how do I get the member (or the class containing the member) to which my custom attribute was applied? Aaronaught suggested against walking up the stack to find the class member to which my attribute was applied, but how else would I get this information from within the constructor of my attribute?

Answer 1

Attributes provide metadata and don't know anything about the thing (class, member, etc.) they are decorating. On the other hand, the thing being decorated can ask for the attributes it is decorated with.

If you must know the type of the thing being decorated you will need to explicitly pass it to your attribute in its constructor.

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method | AttributeTargets.Property, 
    AllowMultiple = true)] 
public class MyCustomAttribute : Attribute
{
   Type type;

   public MyCustomAttribute(Type type)
   {
      this.type = type;
   }
}