Question:

I'm trying to retrieve the value for a particular property of an entity into a variable using the following code.

var item = db.Notices .Where(a => a.ID == 0) .Select(x => x .GetType() .GetProperty("Spell_ID") .GetValue(x));

I'm just playing around with this at the moment, but at some point I'd like to be able to replace the 'Spell_ID' text with any column name and get the value dynamically. Not sure if I'm going the right way around this, but I'm getting the following error:-

<em>LINQ to Entities does not recognize the method 'System.Object GetValue(System.Object)' method, and this method cannot be translated into a store expression.</em>

I know I'm not doing this the right way (and I'm relatively new to C# MVC / LINQ), but I've spent so much time tinkering with the code I've lost my way...can somebody point me in the right direction please?

Your current code uses reflection to get the value of a property, but, from what I can infer from your exception message, db is an Entity Framework DbContext.

Entity framework does not support reflection at all, because your LINQ query is then converted into a SQL query by the framework itself. For this reason you have to change your approach if you really need to get a single property:

var items = db.Notices.Where(a => a.ID == 0).ToList(); var itemsProperty = items.Select(x => x.GetType().GetProperty("Spell_ID"));

This will fetch all the resources from the database and then execute the Select part in memory.

If you expect only a <strong>single</strong> entity from your database than this is a better approach:

var entity = db.Notices.SingleOrDefault(a => a.ID == 0); var property = entity.GetType().GetProperty("Spell_ID");

Not to be tounge-in-cheek, but the error

<em>LINQ to Entities does not recognize the method 'System.Object GetValue(System.Object)' method, and this method cannot be translated into a store expression.</em>

is exactly what it sounds like. LINQ is unable to translate the GetValue() method to whatever it is that Entity Framework does exactly.

While there are ways to get EF and LINQ to recognize methods, its kinda a pain. The quickest solution would be to just use a loop.