Question

I have a Windows.Forms.ListView where the user shall be able to add and remove entries. Particularly, those are files (with attributes) the user can pick through a dialog. Now, I want to check whether the file names / entries I get from the file picker are already in the list; in other words, there shall only be unique items in the ListView.

I could not find any way to compare ListViewItems to check whether the exact same entry and information is already present in my ListView. The only way I see now is to:

> Loop through the files I get from the picker (multiselect is true)
 > Loop through ListView.Items
   compare ListViewItem.Text
   > Loop through ListViewItem.SubItems
     compare .Text

If during the comparisons a complete match was found, the new entry is a duplicate and thus is not added afterwards.

This seems like an awful lot of effort to do something that I would find to be a function that is not so uncommon. Is there any other way to achieve this?

Answer 1

The file system itself uses only the filename to test for uniqueness, so you should do the same, no need to compare sub-items too.