Microstations v8i ss4 MDL Programming

Appologies for asking such a simple question:

given that I have a pointer to a MSElement as below, how could I get a pointer to a MSElementDescr? Since MSElementDescr is dynamically created, I'm assuming that there is some mdl funciton that takes in a MSElement paramter and provided a pointer to the element descriptor after creating the descriptor. But I have not been able to find such a mdl function, does one exist?

MSElement *elP;