Property paths

Property paths are strings that describe the location of a property within a container object.

Concept

You can use property paths to get or set the data of an object at a specific path or accept a visitor on a sub-property of an object.

Property paths are constructed from strings and resolve a specific property instance from a root object. For example, the path foo.bar.baz[12] resolves the 13th element of the baz list container within the bar container, which is nested inside the foo container.

To create and manipulate property paths, use the Unity.Properties.PropertyPath class.

You can use property paths to do the following:

• Get or set the data of an object at a specific path
• Accept a visitor on a sub-property of an object

Performance considerations

Unity.Properties.PropertyPath is an immutableYou cannot change the contents of an immutable (read-only) package. This is the opposite of mutable. Most packages are immutable, including packages downloaded from the package registry or by Git URL.
See in Glossary struct type. When you construct a property path from a string, allocations occur for sub-string extraction.

The following table lists the allocation behaviors when a property path is constructed from a string:

The following table lists the allocation behaviors when a property path is constructed from parts:

To optimize performance and avoid allocating memory:

• Initialize and cache property paths during initialization routines.
• Combine or append property path parts instead of constructing it from a string, up to four parts.

Additional resources

• Property bags
• Property visitors
• Use PropertyVisitor to create a property visitor
• Use low-level APIs to create a property visitor