Question

I have a funny feeling I’m approaching this problem wrongly. Here’s what I’m trying to do:

I have a list of strings (List<string>) and I want to return all the rows from a table where a particular field in that row matches one of the strings in the list. This is simple if I use a loop and execute one Linq statement per string. Of course, I want to avoid as many round-trips to the database as possible.

What sort of strategy would you recommend here? I’m comfortable using LINQ together with Entity Framework but I realise I might be limited by these particular technologies.

I’m using Entity Framework 4.

Answer 1

You can use List.Contains:

List<string> yourList = ...;
var query = context.YourTable.Where(x => yourList.Contains(x.Foo));