Deep Copy using Reflection in an Extension Method for Silverlight?

Question

So I\'m trying to find a generic extension method that creates a deep copy of an object using reflection, that would work in Silverlight. Deep copy using serialization is no

Answer 1

Required Namespaces:

using System.Reflection;
using System.Collections.Generic;

Method:

    private readonly static object _lock = new object();

    public static T cloneObject(T original, List propertyExcludeList)
    {
        try
        {
            Monitor.Enter(_lock);
            T copy = Activator.CreateInstance();
            PropertyInfo[] piList = typeof(T).GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);
            foreach (PropertyInfo pi in piList)
            {
                if (!propertyExcludeList.Contains(pi.Name))
                {
                    if (pi.GetValue(copy, null) != pi.GetValue(original, null))
                    {
                        pi.SetValue(copy, pi.GetValue(original, null), null);
                    }
                }
            }
            return copy;
        }
        finally
        {
            Monitor.Exit(_lock);
        }
    }

This is not specific to Silverlight in any way - it is just plain Reflection.

As written it will only work with objects that have a parameterless constructor. To use objects that require constructor parameters, you will need to pass in an object[] with the parameters, and use a different overload of the Activator.CreateInstance method e.g.

T copy = (T)Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(T), initializationParameters);

The propertyExcludeList parameter is a list of property names that you wish to exclude from the copy, if you want to copy all properties just pass an empty list e.g.

new List()