How to print the information out of a KeyValuePair<K,T> in C#?

Question

I have a list of KeyValuePair<K,T>. I would like to print the details from T, but I do not know its type in order to do a cast. For example the value stored in T could be a Student, a Person, a Movie, etc, and I would like to print out the information. Assuming I have p as KeyValuePair, I tried doing p.Value.ToString() but it would only print out the type. Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

You need to override ToString method in your types if you wanna get meaningful outputs when you call it.

You can find detailed explanation in here about how to do it:

• How To: Override the ToString Method (C# Programming Guide)

Answer 2

You can use reflection to print property values: How to recursively print the values of an object's properties using reflection

public void PrintProperties(object obj)
{
    PrintProperties(obj, 0);
}
public void PrintProperties(object obj, int indent)
{
    if (obj == null) return;
    string indentString = new string(' ', indent);
    Type objType = obj.GetType();
    PropertyInfo[] properties = objType.GetProperties();
    foreach (PropertyInfo property in properties)
    {
        object propValue = property.GetValue(obj, null);
        if (property.PropertyType.Assembly == objType.Assembly)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("{0}{1}:", indentString, property.Name);
            PrintProperties(propValue, indent + 2);
        }
        else
        {
            Console.WriteLine("{0}{1}: {2}", indentString, property.Name, propValue);
        }
    }
}

You can use reflection: C# getting its own class name

this.GetType().Name

Selman22's solution is if you want to really control the output of what gets printed - usually a better strategy if you can control the ToString on all the objects.