Accessing object property as string and setting its value

Question

I have an instance of the Account class. Each account object has an owner, reference, etc.

One way I can access an accounts properties is through accessors like

account.Reference;

but I would like to be able to access it using dynamic string selectors like:

account["PropertyName"];

just like in JavaScript. So I would have account["Reference"] which would return the value, but I also would like to be able to assign a new value after that like:

account["Reference"] = "124ds4EE2s";

I've noticed I can use

DataBinder.Eval(account,"Reference") 

to get a property based on a string, but using this I can't assign a value to the property.

Any idea on how I could do that?

Answer 1

First of all, you should avoid using this; C# is a strongly-typed language, so take advantage of the type safety and performance advantages that accompany that aspect.

If you have a legitimate reason to get and set the value of a property dynamically (in other words, when the type and/or property name is not able to be defined in the code), then you'll have to use reflection.

The most inline-looking way would be this:

object value = typeof(YourType).GetProperty("PropertyName").GetValue(yourInstance);
...
typeof(YourType).GetProperty("PropertyName").SetValue(yourInstance, "value");

However, you can cache the PropertyInfo object to make it more readable:

System.Reflection.PropertyInfo prop = typeof(YourType).GetProperty("PropertyName");

object value = prop.GetValue(yourInstance);
...
prop.SetValue(yourInstance, "value");