Get the name of a class as a string in C#

Is there a way to take a class name and convert it to a string in C#?

As part of the Entity Framework, the .Include method takes in a dot-delimited list of strings to join on when performing a query. I have the class model of what I want to join, and for reasons of refactoring and future code maintenance, I want to be able to have compile-time safety when referencing this class.

Thus, is there a way that I could do this:

class Foo
{
}

tblBar.Include ( Foo.GetType().ToString() );

I don't think I can do GetType() without an instance. Any ideas?

Solution 1:

You can't use .GetType() without an instance because GetType is a method.

You can get the name from the type though like this:

typeof(Foo).Name

And as pointed out by Chris, if you need the assembly qualified name you can use

typeof(Foo).AssemblyQualifiedName

Solution 2:

Include requires a property name, not a class name. Hence, it's the name of the property you want, not the name of its type. You can get that with reflection.

Solution 3:

You could also do something like this:

Type CLASS = typeof(MyClass);

And then you can just access the name, namespace, etc.

 string CLASS_NAME = CLASS.Name;
 string NAMESPACE = CLASS.Namespace;