Dynamically referencing properties in NHibernate?

Question

I'm currently cutting my teeth on nHibernate and had a question with regards to dynamically accessing properties in my persistent objects.

I have the following class in my Domain:

public class Locations {
    public virtual string CountryCode;
    public virtual string CountryName;
}

Now, assuming I have a reference to a Locations object, is there any way for me to do something like this?

Locations myCountry = new LocationsRepository().GetByCountryCode("US");
myCountry.Set("CountryName", "U.S.A.");

instead of having to do :

myCountry.CountryName = "U.S.A."

Without reflection?

Answer 1

If your goal of avoiding reflection is to increase performance, then a simple solution is to hard-code the functionality with all the properties like this:

public class Locations {
    public virtual string CountryCode;
    public virtual string CountryName;

    public void Set(string propertyName, string value) {
        if (propertyName == "CountryCode") this.CountryCode = value;
        else if (propertyName == "CountryName") this.CountryName = value;
        else throw new ArgumentException("Unrecognized property '" + propertyName + "'");
    }
}

You could easily make this approach tenable by using T4 templates to generate the Set methods for all of your domain classes programmatically. In fact, we do similar kinds of things in our own code-base, using T4 templates to generate adapters and serializers to avoid the cost of reflection at run-time while gaining the flexibility of reflection for code-generation at compile-time.