Question

I have an IEnumerable that I’ve materialized from Linq2Sql. I’ve already filtered out the records I want, now I want to order them based on a selected enum:

public enum Sort
{
  Time,
  Name,
  Value
}

public class LinqClass
{
   public DateTime Time;
   public string Name;
   public double Value;
}

Sort sort = Sort.Time
items.OrderBy(sort);

What is the best way to do this? I could create an overloaded OrderBy(Sort s) that is just a big switch statement:

switch(sort)
  case Time:
    return this.OrderBy(x=>x.Time);

I could probably do something with a dictionary too. Any other ideas, or is there a standard pattern for doing this.

Answer 1

A switch statement is probably the best approach, as it makes it easy to spot when an invalid value has been passed.

You could use a Dictionary<Sort, Func<IEnumerable<LinqClass>, IEnumerable<LinqClass>>> but I don’t think it would be worth it.