How Can I Efficiently Find Public Properties with a Specific Custom Attribute in C#?

Finding Properties with Specific Attributes Using Reflection

Custom attributes are a powerful tool for annotating types and members in .NET code. It becomes necessary to retrieve information about these attributes programmatically at times. This question focuses on retrieving a list of public properties that are attributed with a specific custom attribute called MyAttribute, which has the AllowMultiple property set to false.

The provided code uses a loop to iterate through the properties of the type and checks for the presence of the custom attribute using GetCustomAttributes(). While this approach is functional, it involves materializing attribute instances, which comes with a performance cost.

A more efficient approach is to use the Where() extension method on the GetProperties() collection, as demonstrated in the given answer:

var props = t.GetProperties().Where(
    prop => Attribute.IsDefined(prop, typeof(MyAttribute)));

This code leverages the Attribute.IsDefined() method, which checks for the existence of a specific attribute type on a member without creating any attribute instances. The lambda expression ensures that only properties with the MyAttribute are selected into the props variable.

Utilizing this approach avoids the overhead associated with materializing attribute instances, resulting in a more lightweight and performant solution.

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