How to find if a member variable is readonly?

Question

class Bla {     public readonly int sum; }  FieldInfo f = type.GetField("sum"); f.??   // what? 

How do I find if sum is readonly or not? For properties I can do PropertyInfo.CanWrite to find if the member has write access.

Answer 1

readonly means that field assignment can occur only near field declaration or inside a constructor. So you can use IsInitOnly property on a FieldInfo, which

Gets a value indicating whether the field can only be set in the body of the constructor

More details are on the IsInitOnly MSDN article

FieldInfo f = typeof(Bla).GetField("sum"); Console.WriteLine(f.IsInitOnly); //return true 

Notes: you also can use IsLiteral property to test if the field is compiled time constant. It will return false for readonly field, but true for fields, marked with const.

Another note: reflection doesn't prevent you from writing into readonly and private field (same is true for public readonly, but I want to show a more restricted case). So the next code examples are valid and won't throw any exceptions:

class Bla {     //note field is private now     private readonly int sum = 0; } 

Now if you get the field and write a value to it (I use BindingFlags to get private non-static fields, because GetField won't return FieldInfo for private fields by default)

FieldInfo field = typeof(Bla).GetField("sum", BindingFlags.NonPublic |                                               BindingFlags.Instance);  var bla = new Bla(); field.SetValue(bla, 42);  Console.WriteLine(field.GetValue(bla)); //prints 42 

All works ok. It will throw an exception only if a field is const.