How to get Field-name and Field-value from an object ?

Question

A big hello to all C# gurus :) .. am quite a novice in this, and am desperate to find some solution to my problem .. So please excuse me if this sounds too dumb .... and yes - any help is very much appreciated.

This is my class :

public class Product
{
   public string product_name;
   public string brand_name;
   public float width;
   public float height;
   public float depth;
   ....
   .... many more such fields
}

And I have filled my 'Product' instances with data and serialized them into individual xml files, and so I have around 1000 xml files. Now I need to fill my database (mySQL) with this data for each product.
In my product DB table, column names are exactly the same as the field names of my class.

I figured out that I can use MemberInfo.Name to get all the field names of my Product class. and I wish to programatically populate my DB with the values in the XMLs WITHOUT typing in the fieldnames individually.
I mean I DONOT want to write iProduct.product_name, iProduct.brand_name, etc. in the code to write to the DB, but would like to use MemberInfo.Name (or anything similar) to generate the field name dynamically.

If I have an object already populated with data, could someone please point me to how can I extract both the Field-name and Field-value from this object?

Many thanks for reading

Sam Hobbs · Answer

I think it does not matter whether you do the mySQL part. You say  serialized them into individual xml files  which implies you know the schema of the XML and all that. Since you have the code to save to disk I don't understand why you can't make code that does the reverse. If you want to write more generalized code that can process XML files without specifying the field names in the code then that would be a lot of work since the code would need to be able to negotiate through the hierarchy of data. Your files migh not have a complex hierarchy of data and therefore it seems to be too much work to develop a generalized utility. So the solution depends on what your requirements actually are and that is not clear to me.

Sindhu Nair · Answer

Thanks Sam what you say makes sense to me. I'll go with navigating through the xml nodes and values since the xml is after all my object itself ..

Sindhu Nair · Answer

Hi Sam thanks for the reply ... suppose I skip the mySQL part and I just need to extract all field-names and corresponding field-values from my object WITHOUT typing the field names ?

Sam Hobbs · Answer

Is the purpose to transfer data in XML to a mySQL database? To do that it seems unnecessary to create C# objects. Perhaps the solution depends on why you need to.