Question

I am currently developing a forum. I am new to LINQ and EF. In my forum I have a display that shows a list of topics with the most recent topics first.

The problem is that "most recent" is relative to the topic’s replies. So I don’t want to order the list by the topic’s posted date, rather I want to order the list by the topic’s last reply’s posted date. So that topics with newer replies pop back to the top of the list. This is rather simple if I knew that every topic had at least one reply; I would just do this:

var topicsQuery = from x in board.Topics
                  orderby x.Replies.Last().PostedDate descending
                  select x;

However, in many cases the topic has no replies. In which case I would like to use the topic’s posted date instead. Is there a way within my linq query to order by x.PostedDate in the event that the topic has no replies? I’m getting confused by this.

With the above query, it breaks on topics with no replies because of the x.Replies.Last() which assumes there are replies. LastOrDefault() doesn’t work because I need to access the PostedDate property which also assumes a reply exists.

Answer 1

var topicsQuery = from x in board.Topics
                  let lastActivityDate = x.Replies.Any() 
                         ? x.Replies.Last().PostedDate 
                         : x.PostedDate
                  orderby lastActivityDate descending
                  select x;

Edit:

To answer your comment, there is no ‘let’ for linq expression syntax explicitly. But, you can achieve the same as follows (using an intermediate select expression):

var topicsQuery = board.Topics.Select(x => new { 
                                                  Topic = x, 
                                                  LastActivityDate = x.Replies.Any() 
                                                      ? x.Replies.Last().PostedDate 
                                                      : x.PostedDate
                                    })
                             .OrderByDescending(p => p.LastActivityDate)
                             .Select(r => r.Topic)

Edit2:

This can be simplified further as Nicholas was suggesting, we can remove the intermediate select statement as well. Note, this wouldn’t have been possible if not for differed execution.

var topicsQuery = board.Topics
        .OrderByDescending(x => x.Replies.Any() 
                                      ? x.Replies.Last().PostedDate 
                                      : x.PostedDate);