Linq handling variable number of OrderBy

I need to support a variable number of Orderby terms in a Linq (to 开发者_运维百科Entity) statement. That is, my function will accept a list of properties on which the data should be order. The properties can have both ascending or descending sorts. What is the best way to handle constructing the Linq query?

Thanks!

You should be able to do something along these lines:

public IEnumerable<MyType> DoSomething(params Expression<Func<MyType,object>>[] properties)
 {
     var query = // create LINQ query that returns IQueryable<MyType>
     query = query.OrderBy(properties.First());

     foreach (var property in properties.Skip(1))
     {
         query = query.ThenBy(property);
     }
 }

 …

 var results = DoSomething(() => x.Age, () => x.Height, () => x.LastName);

You'd need to handle the case where fewer than 2 properties are specified.

Following on from Jay's answer, this can be made into a nice extension method:

public static class EnumerableExtensions
{
    public static IEnumerable<T> OrderByMany<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable, 
        params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] expressions)
    {
        if (expressions.Length == 1)
            return enumerable.OrderBy(expressions[0].Compile());

        var query = enumerable.OrderBy(expressions[0].Compile());
        for (int i = 1; i < expressions.Length;i++)
        {
            query = query.ThenBy(expressions[i].Compile());
        }
        return query;

    }
}

Usage becomes quite simple, given a test object:

public class Person
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }
}

This is then possible:

var people = new Person[]
                    {
                        new Person() {Name = "John", Age = 40},
                        new Person() {Name = "John", Age = 20},
                        new Person() {Name = "Agnes", Age = 11}
                    };

foreach(var per in  people.OrderByMany(x => x.Name, x => x.Age))
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0} Age={1}",per.Name,per.Age);
}

Output:

Agnes Age=11
John Age=20
John Age=40

UPDATE

You could add another overload of the OrderByMany method to support SortOrder as well, although it gets clunky rather quickly. Personally I'd just go for the syntax

var query = from p 
            in people
            order by Name, Age descending;

However, for the record, in C#4 at least, I would accomplish the overload using an enum & tuple.

public enum SortOrder
{
    Ascending, 
    Descending
}

and the extra overload:

public static IEnumerable<T> OrderByMany<T>(this IEnumerable<T> enumerable,
    params Tuple<Expression<Func<T, object>>,SortOrder>[] expressions)
{

    var query = (expressions[0].Item2 == SortOrder.Ascending)
                    ? enumerable.OrderBy(expressions[0].Item1.Compile())
                    : enumerable.OrderByDescending(expressions[0].Item1.Compile());

    for (int i = 1; i < expressions.Length; i++)
    {
        query = expressions[i].Item2 == SortOrder.Ascending
                    ? query.ThenBy(expressions[i].Item1.Compile())
                    : query.ThenByDescending(expressions[i].Item1.Compile());
    }
    return query;

}

Usage becomes clumsy and hard to read:

foreach (var per in people.OrderByMany(
                    new Tuple<Expression<Func<Person, object>>, SortOrder>(x => x.Age, SortOrder.Descending), 
                    new Tuple<Expression<Func<Person, object>>, SortOrder>(x => x.Name, SortOrder.Ascending)))
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0} Age={1}", per.Name, per.Age);
}

To sort by an arbitrary property, you need to build an expression tree to pass to OrderBy.

To sort by an arbitrary number of properties, you need to call ThenBy in a loop.

I like Jamiec's idea but I hate using Tuples because the syntax is ugly. Therefore I built a small class that encapsulates the Tuple and exposes getters for the Item1 and Item2 properties with better variable names.

Also notice that I used a default sort order of ascending so you only need to specify a SortOrder if you want to sort in descending order.

public class SortExpression<T>
{
    private Tuple<Expression<Func<T, object>>, SortOrder> tuple;        

    public SortExpression( Expression<Func<T, object>> expression, SortOrder order =SortOrder.Ascending )
    {
        tuple = new Tuple<Expression<Func<T,object>>, SortOrder>(expression, order);
    }

    public Expression<Func<T, object>> Expression {
        get { return tuple.Item1; }
    }

    public SortOrder Order {
        get { return tuple.Item2; }
    }
}

In my specific application, I have a repository base class which takes an IQueryable and converts it to a ObservableCollection. In that method I use the SortExpression class:

public ObservableCollection<T> GetCollection(params SortExpression<T>[] sortExpressions) {
    var list = new ObservableCollection<T>();
    var query = FindAll();

    if (!sortExpressions.Any()) {
        query.ToList().ForEach(list.Add);
        return list;
    }

    var ordered = (sortExpressions[0].Order == SortOrder.Ascending)
        ? query.OrderBy(sortExpressions[0].Expression.Compile())
        : query.OrderByDescending(sortExpressions[0].Expression.Compile());

    for (var i = 1; i < sortExpressions.Length; i++) {
        ordered = sortExpressions[i].Order == SortOrder.Ascending
            ? ordered.ThenBy(sortExpressions[i].Expression.Compile())
            : ordered.ThenByDescending(sortExpressions[i].Expression.Compile());
    }

    ordered.ToList().ForEach(list.Add);
    return list;
}        

Here is the method in use:

var repository = new ContactRepository(UnitOfWork);
return repository.GetCollection(
                    new SortExpression<Contact>(x => x.FirstName),
                    new SortExpression<Contact>(x => x.LastName));