Accessing object property as string and setting its value

Solution 1:

First of all, you should avoid using this; C# is a strongly-typed language, so take advantage of the type safety and performance advantages that accompany that aspect.

If you have a legitimate reason to get and set the value of a property dynamically (in other words, when the type and/or property name is not able to be defined in the code), then you'll have to use reflection.

The most inline-looking way would be this:

object value = typeof(YourType).GetProperty("PropertyName").GetValue(yourInstance);
...
typeof(YourType).GetProperty("PropertyName").SetValue(yourInstance, "value");

However, you can cache the PropertyInfo object to make it more readable:

System.Reflection.PropertyInfo prop = typeof(YourType).GetProperty("PropertyName");

object value = prop.GetValue(yourInstance);
...
prop.SetValue(yourInstance, "value");

Solution 2:

You could try combining the indexer with reflection...

public object this[string propertyName]
{
    get
    {
        PropertyInfo property = GetType().GetProperty(propertyName);
        return property.GetValue(this, null);
    }
    set
    {
        PropertyInfo property = GetType().GetProperty(propertyName);
        property.SetValue(this,value, null);
    }
}

Solution 3:

If they are your own objects you could provide an indexer to access the fields. I don't really recommend this but it would allow what you want.

public object this[string propertyName]
{
    get
    {
        if(propertyName == "Reference")
            return this.Reference;
        else
            return null;
    }
    set
    {
        if(propertyName == "Reference")
            this.Reference = value;
        else
            // do error case here            
    }
}

Note that you lose type safety when doing this.