Strange Effect with Overridden Properties and Reflection
- by naacal
I've come across a strange behaviour in .NET/Reflection and cannot find any solution/explanation for this:
Class A
{
public string TestString { get; set; }
}
Class B : A
{
public override string TestString
{
get { return "x"; }
}
}
Since properties are just pairs of functions (get_PropName(), set_PropName()) overriding only the "get" part should leave the "set" part as it is in the base class. And this is just what happens if you try to instanciate class B and assign a value to TestString, it uses the implementation of class A.
But what happens if I look at the instantiated object of class B in reflection is this:
PropertyInfo propInfo = b.GetType().GetProperty("TestString");
propInfo.CanRead ---> true
propInfo.CanWrite ---> false(!)
And if I try to invoke the setter from reflection with:
propInfo.SetValue("test", b, null);
I'll even get an ArgumentException with the following message:
Property set method not found.
Is this as expected? Because I don't seem to find a combination of BindingFlags for the GetProperty() method that returns me the property with a working get/set pair from reflection.
