Can't get DisplayAttribute Name

I have a partial class generated from EF4 that I assign a MetadataType in order to display on an ASP.NET MVC3 form the name for a control and it works as expected.

I would like to use the same DisplayAttribute assigned to each property to retreive the displayed Name value for the property for another purpose. My classes are like this:

using Domain.Metadata;

namespace Domain
{
    [MetadataType(typeof(ClassAMetada))]
    public partial class ClassA
    {}
}

namespace Domain.Metadata
{
    public class ClassAMetada
    {
        [Display(Name = "Property 1 Description", Order = 1)]
        public Boolean Property1;

        [Display(Name = "Property 2 Description", Order = 2)]
        public Boolean Property2;
    }
}

I've already saw this 3 posts and tried the presented solutions:

• How to get Di开发者_如何学GosplayAttribute of a property by Reflection?
• C# Buddy Classes / Meta Data and Reflection
• Get [DisplayName] attribute of a property in strongly-typed way

but none of them can retreive the attribute Name value; the attribute is not found and, therefore, is null, so it returns an empty string (3rd question) or the property name (1st question); the 2nd question was slighty changed in order to discover the attribute, but the result is also an empty string.

Can you please help me with this one? Thanks a lot!

EDIT:

here is the code for the 2 methods I'm using to retreive the attribute value (both work separately). Both are quite similar: the first one uses a string with the name of the property and the other one uses a lamba expression.

private static string GetDisplayName(Type dataType, string fieldName)
{
    DisplayAttribute attr;
    attr = (DisplayAttribute)dataType.GetProperty(fieldName).GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DisplayAttribute), true).SingleOrDefault();

    if (attr == null)
    {
        MetadataTypeAttribute metadataType = (MetadataTypeAttribute)dataType.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(MetadataTypeAttribute), true).FirstOrDefault();
        if (metadataType != null)
        {
            var property = metadataType.MetadataClassType.GetProperty(fieldName);
            if (property != null)
            {
                attr = (DisplayAttribute)property.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DisplayAttribute), true).SingleOrDefault();
            }
        }
    }
    return (attr != null) ? attr.Name : String.Empty;
}


private static string GetPropertyName<T>(Expression<Func<T>> expression)
{
    MemberExpression propertyExpression = (MemberExpression)expression.Body;
    MemberInfo propertyMember = propertyExpression.Member;

    Object[] displayAttributes = propertyMember.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DisplayAttribute), true);
    if (displayAttributes != null && displayAttributes.Length == 1)
        return ((DisplayAttribute)displayAttributes[0]).Name;

    return propertyMember.Name;
}

---

Did you consider putting your display name into resources? It's much easier to reuse than all this reflection magic.

You can simply do:

[Display(Name = "Property1Name", ResourceType = typeof(Resources), Order = 1)]
public Boolean Property1;

And add Resources.resx file to your project with Property1Name key and "Property 1 Description" value. Of course you'll probably have to set default resources access from internal to public.

Later, in other places you need those strings simply call:

string displayName = Domain.Resources.Property1Name;