call a variable with a variable

[lazypeople]

I'm attempting to set a variable from a variable i've searched high and low and looked in many books but still to no avail. I guess i'm using the wrong keyword.

I have many public variables like this:

Public Shared var1 As String

i want to call them dynamically from a string something similar to this:

"var1" = "data"

I know in php you can use $$ to do a similar thing how do i do this in vb.net

Many thanks
Ben

[yarbrough40]

I think you want the CallByName() function

[lazypeople]

I've looked in to that but it appears not to work :S

[yarbrough40]

I see.. I believe I also tried to do this at one point. I don't believe it is possible. Maybe you could create a function that returns the variable you want based on some parameter. like

 Private Function MyVariable(ByVal s as String) as Object

if s = "bla" then Return var1
if s = "dude" then Return var2

End Function

[Joseph Martell]

Doing this is pretty complicated. Yarbrough40 has the most straight-forward way to accomplish your goal, but to reference a member by the name of the member as a string, you really have to use reflection.

This is what reflection is really for. You are essentially trying to ask a class if it has a member called "blah" and if it does have that member, you want to set it. What is easy to do at design time is very complex to accomplish at run time.

For a simple class such as:

Public Class TestClass2
    Public Shared var1 As String
End Class

This is how you can access var1 using reflection:

Dim myTestClass2 As New TestClass2()
Dim myFieldInfo As FieldInfo = myTestClass2.GetType().GetField("var1")
If (myFieldInfo IsNot Nothing) Then
    myFieldInfo.SetValue(myTestClass2, "new value", BindingFlags.SetField, Nothing, Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)
End If