Question

I have an array of items and I would like to sort on one of their properties. I can access the items property using ‘item.Fields[‘FieldName’].Value‘ the property is returned as a string but I can cast it to an int.

I had a look at OrderBy<> but I have no idea of how to use it.

Answer 1

To be clear, OrderBy won’t sort the array in place – it will return a new sequence which is a sorted copy of the array. If that’s okay, then you want something like:

var sorted = array.OrderBy(item => item.Fields['FieldName'].Value); 

On the other hand, I don’t understand your comment that the property is returned as a string but that you can cast it to an int – you can’t cast strings to ints, you have to parse them. If that’s what you meant, you probably want:

var sorted = array.OrderBy(item => int.Parse(item.Fields['FieldName'].Value)); 

If you want that as an array, you can call ToArray() afterwards:

var sorted = array.OrderBy(item => int.Parse(item.Fields['FieldName'].Value))                   .ToArray(); 

Alternatively you could use Array.Sort if you want to sort in-place, but that will be somewhat messier.