Question

I have a struct containing song data:

public struct uLib     {         public string Path;         public string Artist;         public string Title;         public string Album;         public string Length;     }   

My library consists of an array of this uLib. How would I sort this array by say Artist? Is there a native sort function I can call on this type of array, or will I have to ‘roll my own’?

Answer 1

First of all, that should not be a struct. It’s larger than 16 bytes, so you don’t get the performance benefits of having a struct. Also, it doesn’t represent a single value, so it doesn’t make sense semantically to make it a struct. Just make it a class instead.

The Array class has a Sort method that you can use:

Array.Sort(theArray, (x,y) => string.Compare(x.Artist,y.Artist)); 

If you don’t have C# 3 you use a delegate instead of the lambda expression:

Array.Sort(theArray, delegate(uLib x, uLib y) { return string.Compare(x.Artist,y.Artist) } ); 

Edit:
Here’s an example of what your data could look like as a class:

public class ULib {      private string _path, _artist, _title, _album, _length;      public string Path { get { return _path; } set { _path = value; } }     public string Artist { get { return _artist; } set { _artist = value; } }     public string Title { get { return _title; } set { _title = value; } }     public string Album { get { return _album; } set { _album = value; } }     public string Length { get { return _length; } set { _length = value; } }      public ULib() {}      public ULib(string path, string artist, string title, string album, string length) {        Path = path;        Artist = artist;        Title = title;        Album = album;        Length = length;     }  } 

In C# there there is a short form for a property. Instead of writing code for a private variable and a setter and getter to access it, this creates that automatically:

public string Path { get; set; }