I have a custom control that inherits the standard ASP.NET DropDownList that I built a while ago to bind to tables that contain lookup data.

I set the data object name that I want to bind the control to as a property on my form and then use Reflection and the EntityCollectionBase class in the control to generate my collection.

This all works fine:

System.Reflection.Assembly asm = System.Reflection.Assembly.Load("Sequence.FiveCounties.DAL");
SD.LLBLGen.Pro.ORMSupportClasses.EntityCollectionBase inst = (SD.LLBLGen.Pro.ORMSupportClasses.EntityCollectionBase)asm.CreateInstance("Sequence.FiveCounties.DAL.CollectionClasses." + dataObject + "Collection");
inst.GetMulti(null);

Thing is because of one thing and another I need to sort the items before calling DataBind(). I've happily added some properties, so things like field name in the collection, direction, that sort of thing, but calling Sort on a Collection requires the FieldIndex as an int. I cannot do the normal (int)MyEntityFieldIndex.MyFieldName because I cannot have the individual collections field indexes as properties, I want to be able to pass in a string for the name.

Is there a way of getting from say a string "MyFieldName" to (int)MyEntityFieldIndex when the collection is not generated until run time?

Thanks.

It's okay, must be having Friday moment, it's dead easy.

inst.Sort(sortItem, sortDirection, null)

where sortItem is my string for the column to sort on and sortDirection is ListSortDirection.

D'oh!