Question

I am writing an Excel exporter for a bespoke application I am creating, and I have a question about LINQ grouping in C#.

Basically, this new Excel exporter class is given two dates. The class then retrieves all consignments between this date range.

As part of this exporter, I need to be able to group the dates into weeks, and get the values for that week. So for example, if I’m given 07/12/2011 and 22/12/2011 (dd/MM/yyyy format), I need to group all consignments between them ranges into weeks (each week beginning with Sunday). The ideal result using the above dates would be

Week 1: (consignments between 04/12/2011 and 10/12/2011) 
Week 2: (consignments between 11/12/2011 and 17/12/2011) 
Week 3: (consignments between 18/11/2011 and 24/12/2011)

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The fundamental question here is how to project a DateTime instance into a week of year value. This can be done using by calling Calendar.GetWeekOfYear. So define the projection:

Func<DateTime, int> weekProjector = 
    d => CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.Calendar.GetWeekOfYear(
         d,
         CalendarWeekRule.FirstFourDayWeek,
         DayOfWeek.Sunday);

You can configure exactly how the “week number” is determined by tweaking the parameters in the method call. You can also decide to define the projection as e.g. an extension method if you prefer; this does not change the essence of the code. In any case, you are then ready to group by week:

var consignmentsByWeek = from con in consignments
                         group con by weekProjector(con.Date);

If you also want to constrain the output to consigments between two specific dates, just add an appropriate where clause; the grouping logic does not change.