Overriding Equals for classes with many properties in C#

Question

I have a number of data classes that have over 25 properties of different value types (and this may change in the future as requirements change). I would like to override equals, mostly for unit testing purposes.

Currently, the only way I know how to do this is to actually test for equality of each property hard coded. This seems bad for two reasons - first, I will have to write a lot of code to test 25 properties for equality - second, if a property in one of the classes is added at a later point in time, the Equals method will not check that, and most likely this will go unnoticed and lead to problems down the road.

Since Equals usually checks for the properties of classes, there should be a way to dynamically compare the properties of the classes being compared, which ensures that property changes to a class don't result in an incorrect implementation of Equals. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

you could write something like this using reflection - but this would be very slow. I would stick with overriding equals but think about which part you really need for equal. I usually only check the immutable parts (like Id) for equality and just ignore the mutable fields and I think this is a good practice.

Answer 2

Try using reflection to compare the properties. See Comparing object properties in c# for more info!