Question

I have a Dictionary:
Dictionary<string, CustomClass> _details = new Dictionary<string, CustomClass>()

CustomClass implements IComparable as there is custom sort logic in the CompareTo() method.

I want to loop through all my CustomClass‘s in _details in a sorted order.

So I want to do something like this:

foreach (string value in _details.Values.Sort())
{

}

But Sort() isn’t a method on that type

What are my options here?

Answer 1

Your question is somewhat unclear, but on rereading it appears that you want to order by value rather than key. In that case, LINQ is the best approach with the OrderBy method:

foreach (var pair in _details.OrderBy(p => p.Value))
{
    // Use pair.Key and pair.Value here
}

Or if you only want the values in the first place:

foreach (var value in _details.Values.OrderBy(p => p))
{
    // Use value in here
}

Note that you can’t sort a dictionary in-place – Dictionary<,> is fundamentally unordered (or rather, the order is an implementation detail, and cannot be changed in a reliable manner).

If you wanted to sort by key, it would probably be better to use SortedList<,> or SortedDictionary<,> to start with. Both of these will keep the collection sorted by key permanently.