Is it bad practice to use reflection to do DB inserts with data from an external service?

Question

Our supplier's webservice is returning address objects (~30 fields) and I'm using LINQ and reflection to store the returned data straight into the databse. I loop over the attributes and set the value from the object to the LINQ class.

I'm fairly new to refection and I'm worried this may be bad practice; it saves ~30 lines of code in 3 or 4 methods but I'm afraid it could introduce hard to fix bugs.

EDIT Here is the code. Target is normally a LINQ to SQL entity and input would be a webservice object.

public static void SetValues(object target, object input)
{
    Type targetType = target.GetType();
    Type inputType = input.GetType();

    PropertyDescriptorCollection inputProperties = TypeDescriptor.GetProperties(inputType);
    PropertyDescriptorCollection targetProperties = TypeDescriptor.GetProperties(targetType);

    foreach (PropertyDescriptor p in inputProperties)
    {
        object value = p.GetValue(input);

        var t = targetProperties.Find(p.Name, false);
        if (t != null && value != null)
        {
            if (value.GetType() == typeof(string) || value.GetType() == typeof(Int64) || value.GetType() == typeof(int) || value.GetType() == typeof(Boolean))
            {
                t.SetValue(target, value);

            }
            else if (value.GetType() == typeof(DateTime) || value.GetType() == typeof(DateTime?))
            {
                if ((DateTime)value > DateTime.MinValue)
                {
                    t.SetValue(target, value);
                }

            }
            else
            {
                t.SetValue(target, value.ToString());
            }
        }

    }

Answer 1

Personally, I hate reflection in most cases -- I've seen is used to get around bad design decisions or because people don't know better more often than not.

This is not one of those cases -- really it is a key-value match you are doing and it makes sense if you are willing to always keep field names and types in lock-step.

All that said, you might want to look at AutoMapper as it does this in about 3 lines of code and lots more to boot.

Answer 2

From a performance perspective, there is nothing wrong with this code as time it takes to call to the database will dwarf any performance implications of the reflection. However, you are coupling your domain object to your data object by forcing the property names and types to identical. If this isn't an issue for you, I think it's fine.