System.Reflection GetProperties method not returning values

Question

Can some one explain to me why the GetProperties method would not return public values if the class is setup as follows.

public class DocumentA {     public string AgencyNumber = string.Empty;     public bool Description;     public bool Establishment; } 

I am trying to setup a simple unit test method to play around with

The method is as follows and it has all the appropriate using statements and references.

All I'm doing is calling the following but it returns 0

PropertyInfo[] pi = target.GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance); 

But if I setup the class with private members and public properties it works fine.

The reason I didn't setup up the the class the old school way was because it has 61 properties and doing that would increase my lines of code to at least triple that. I would be a maintenance nightmare.

Answer 1

You haven't declared any properties - you've declared fields. Here's similar code with properties:

public class DocumentA {     public string AgencyNumber { get; set; }     public bool Description { get; set; }     public bool Establishment { get; set; }      public DocumentA()      {         AgencyNumber = "";     } } 

I would strongly advise you to use properties as above (or possibly with more restricted setters) instead of just changing to use Type.GetFields. Public fields violate encapsulation. (Public mutable properties aren't great on the encapsulation front, but at least they give an API, the implementation of which can be changed later.)

Answer 2

Because the way you have declared your class now is using Fields. If you want to access the fields trough reflection you should use Type.GetFields() (see Types.GetFields Method1)

I don't now which version of C# you're using but the property syntax has changed in C# 2 to the following:

public class Foo {   public string MyField;   public string MyProperty {get;set;} } 

Wouldn't this help in reducing the amount of code?