Question

I have an object Orders (Order, Product, Cost, Price, Client, Day).
I am retrieving a lot of records from the database and to facilitate filtering, I need to pouplate DropDownLists with the distinct values retrieved so the user can select only specific dates or specific products or even a specific price. The IDs of the DropDownList are created as “ddl_” + name of the concerned field.

What I’d like is to be able to define a simple array like this:

public string[] filterArray = new string[] { "Order", "Product", "Cost", "Price", "Client", "Day" };

Then call a BindDLLs method:

foreach (string filterName in filterArray)
{
    // Find the ddl to populate
    DropDownList ddl = (DropDownList)this.FindControl("ddl_" + filterName);
    // Get the data for that ddl only (use filterName in the select...)
    var query = (from items in results select items.filterName.ToString()).Distinct();

    // Populate the ddl (not complete code...)
    foreach (var item in query)
    {
        ddl.Items.Add(item...);
    }
}

My problem is that I find plenty of documentation on how to modify the WHERE or GROUP BY or any other parts of linq statements at run-time. I just don’t find any on how to change dynamically the field I want to retrieve.

Is there an easy way to do this? Thank you.
Yipi

Edit:

List<Orders> results = OrdersService.GetOrders();

public class Orders
{
    [DataMember]
    public DateTime? Day
    [DataMember]
    public int? Order
    [DataMember]
    public int? Product
    [DataMember]
    public int? Cost
    [DataMember]
    public int? Price
    [DataMember]
    public int? Client
    [DataMember]
}

Answer 1

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/01/07/dynamic-linq-part-1-using-the-linq-dynamic-query-library.aspx

var query = "....";
query = query.Select("PropName");