How can I get a value of a property from an anonymous type?

Question

I have a datagrid populated by a Linq query. When the focused row in the datagrid changes I need to set a variable equal to one of the properties in that object.

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Answer 1

DevExpress's xtraGridView has a method like this GetRowCellDisplayText(int rowHandle, GridColumn column). With this method, the following code returns the id from the anonymous type.

var _selectedId = view.GetRowCellDisplayText(rowHandle, "Id");

Though this does not provide an answer to the question "How can I get access to the anonymous object's property?", it still attempts to solve the root cause of the problem.

I tried this with devXpress version 11.1 and I can see that the question was first asked almost 2.5 years ago. Possibly the author of the question might have got an workaround or found the solution himself. Yet, I am still answering so that it might help someone.

Answer 2

Have you ever tried to use reflection? Here's a sample code snippet:

// use reflection to retrieve the values of the following anonymous type
var obj = new { ClientId = 7, ClientName = "ACME Inc.", Jobs = 5 }; 
System.Type type = obj.GetType(); 
int clientid = (int)type.GetProperty("ClientId").GetValue(obj, null);
string clientname = (string)type.GetProperty("ClientName").GetValue(obj, null);

// use the retrieved values for whatever you want...

Answer 3

var result = ((dynamic)DataGridView.Rows[rowNum].DataBoundItem).value;

Answer 4

Hope this helps, am passing in an interface list, which I need to get a distinct list from. First I get an Anonymous type list, and then I walk it to transfer it to my object list.

private List<StockSymbolResult> GetDistinctSymbolList( List<ICommonFields> l )
            {
                var DistinctList = (
                        from a
                        in l
                        orderby a.Symbol
                        select new
                        {
                            a.Symbol,
                            a.StockID
                        } ).Distinct();

                StockSymbolResult ssr;
                List<StockSymbolResult> rl = new List<StockSymbolResult>();
                foreach ( var i in DistinctList )
                {
                                // Symbol is a string and StockID is an int.
                    ssr = new StockSymbolResult( i.Symbol, i.StockID );
                    rl.Add( ssr );
                }

                return rl;
            }

Answer 5

As JaredPar guessed correctly, the return type of GetRow() is object. When working with the DevExpress grid, you could extract the desired value like this:

int clientId = (int)gridView.GetRowCellValue(rowHandle, "ClientId");

This approach has similar downsides like the "hacky anonymous type casts" described before: You need a magic string for identifying the column plus a type cast from object to int.

Answer 6

A generic solution for getting the value of a data item for a given key

public static T GetValueFromAnonymousType<T>( object dataitem, string itemkey ) {
    System.Type type = dataitem.GetType();
    T itemvalue = (T)type.GetProperty(itemkey).GetValue(dataitem, null);
    return itemvalue;
}

Example:

var dataitem = /* Some value here */;
bool ismember = TypeUtils.GetValueFromAnonymousType<bool>(dataitem, "IsMember");