Binding to attributes

Question

I have a class

public class Car 
{
    [Description("name of the car")]
    public string Name { get; set; }

    [Description("age of the car")]
    public int Age { get; set; }
}

Is there any possibility to bind Description attribute to Label content. The solution what I'm looking for shouldn't require to instantiate Car object.

Answer 1

instead of string literal use string constant to set attribute parameter:

public class Car
{
    public const string CarNamePropertyDescription = "name of the car";
    
    [Description(CarNamePropertyDescription)]
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

constants can be accessed from xaml via {x:Static} extension (no need for Binding since attribute isn't going to change in runtime):

<Label Content="{x:Static namespace:Car.CarNamePropertyDescription}"/>

Answer 2

It won't be a proper binding (which is not necessary for static data anyway) but you can easily create a MarkupExtension to retrieve it, just pass the type and the property name and get it via reflection.

Outline would be something like:

public Type Type { get; set; }
public string PropertyName { get; set; }

ProvideValue: Type.GetProperty(PropertyName)
                  .GetCustomAttributes(true)
                  .OfType<DescriptionAttribute>()
                  .First()
                  .Description

<!-- Usage example -->
Text="{me:Description Type=local:Car, PropertyName=Name}"