Using Reflection to create a DataTable from a Class?

Question

I\'ve just learned about Generics and I\'m wondering whether I can use it to dynamically build datatables from my classes.

Or I might be missing the point here. Here

Answer 1

Here is a more compact version of David's answer that is also an extension function. I've posted the code in a C# project on Github.

public static class Extensions
{
    public static DataTable ToDataTable(this IEnumerable self)
    {
        var properties = typeof(T).GetProperties();

        var dataTable = new DataTable();
        foreach (var info in properties)
            dataTable.Columns.Add(info.Name, Nullable.GetUnderlyingType(info.PropertyType) 
               ?? info.PropertyType);

        foreach (var entity in self)
            dataTable.Rows.Add(properties.Select(p => p.GetValue(entity)).ToArray());

        return dataTable;
    }     
}

I have found that this works very well in conjunction with code to write a DataTable to CSV.