Using System.Reflection to Get a Method's Full Name

Question

I have a class that look like the following:

public class MyClass
{

...

    protected void MyMethod()
    {
    ...
    string myName = System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod.Name;
    ...
    }

...

}

The value of myName is "MyMethod".

Is there a way that I can use Reflection to get a value of "MyClass.MyMethod" for myName instead?

Answer 1

You could look at the ReflectedType of the MethodBase you get from GetCurrentMethod, i.e.,

MethodBase method = System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod();
string methodName = method.Name;
string className = method.ReflectedType.Name;

string fullMethodName = className + "." + methodName;

Answer 2

And to get the full method name with parameters:

var method = System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod();
var fullName = string.Format("{0}.{1}({2})", method.ReflectedType.FullName, method.Name, string.Join(",", method.GetParameters().Select(o => string.Format("{0} {1}", o.ParameterType, o.Name)).ToArray()));

Answer 3

I think these days, it's best to do this:

string fullMethodName = $"{typeof(MyClass).FullName}.{nameof(MyMethod)}";

Answer 4

Extending Ruben's, you can get the full name like this:

var info = System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod();
var result = string.Format(
                 "{0}.{1}.{2}()",
                 info.ReflectedType.Namespace,
                 info.ReflectedType.Name,
                 info.Name);

You can add it to a static method that receives a MethodBase parameter and generates the string.

Answer 5

You can get the full name like this:

var fullMethodName = System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().ReflectedType.FullName;

Answer 6

In C# 6 you can use nameof :

string myName = nameof(MyMethod);

Answer 7

You'll have issues when running inside async methods. Here's how to fix that:

If you need to fully qualify the class name, you'll have to use DeclaringType.FullName instead of DeclaringType.Name

This code won't work nicely for anonymous or lambda methods.

using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;

static string GetMethodContextName() {
    var name = new StackTrace().GetFrame(1).GetMethod().GetMethodContextName();
    return name;
}

static string GetMethodContextName(this MethodBase method) {
    if (method.DeclaringType.GetInterfaces().Any(i => i == typeof(IAsyncStateMachine))) {
        var generatedType = method.DeclaringType;
        var originalType = generatedType.DeclaringType;
        var foundMethod = originalType.GetMethods(
              BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Static 
            | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic 
            | BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly)
            .Single(m => m.GetCustomAttribute<AsyncStateMachineAttribute>()?.StateMachineType == generatedType);
        return foundMethod.DeclaringType.Name + "." + foundMethod.Name;
    } else {
        return method.DeclaringType.Name + "." + method.Name;
    }
}

Here's an example usage:

class Program { 
    static void Main(string[] args) {
        // outputs Program.Main
        Console.WriteLine(GetMethodContextName());
    }
}

Answer 8

Thanks for the posts above, they helped me to create a strong type binding system for MVC 4 HTMLHelpers as follows.

 public static MvcHtmlString StrongTypeBinder(this HtmlHelper htmlhelper, Expression<Func<object, string>> SomeLambda)
    {
        var body = SomeLambda.Body;
        var propertyName = ((PropertyInfo)((MemberExpression)body).Member).Name;
        HtmlString = @"
            <input type='text' name='@Id' id='@Id'/>
            ";
        HtmlString = HtmlString.Replace("@Id", propertyName);
        var finalstring = new MvcHtmlString(HtmlString);
        return finalstring;

    }

To use the code above in any CSHTML View:

@Html.StrongTypeBinder(p=>Model.SelectedDate)

This allows me to bind any property in a ViewModel to any HTML element type I want. In the example above, I an binding the name field for the selected data posted back after user makes selection. The viewmodel after the post back automatically shows the selected value.