Getting encapsulated type of Nullable

Just a short tip for today..

Sometimes I’ve had the requirement to treat value types, where I don’t know if the value type is Nullable<T> or not. Regardless of whether the value type is declared as Nullable<T> or not, it should everytime be treat as T. Thus I’ve had to find out the underlying type of the Nullable<T>.

The following extension method on Type realizes this requirement:

public static class TypeExtensions
{
    public static Type GetBareType(this Type dataType)
    {
        if (dataType != null)
        {
            if (dataType.IsGenericType &&
               (dataType.GetGenericTypeDefinition() == typeof(Nullable<>)))
            {
                dataType = Nullable.GetUnderlyingType(dataType);
            }
        }
        return dataType;
    }
}