Question

i have an object that has a string property called “Status”. I have a collection of these objects and want to order a collection by that field which is a string.

the possible values of Status are:

“Open”, “Closed”, “Pending” so i can’t use alphabetic order. What is the best way to say that “Open” is greater than “Closed” which is greater than “Pending” ?

I know there is an IComparer<> interface but i want to see the most elegant way to define the order of various strings.

Answer 1

How about using an Enum instead of a string?

     public enum Status
     {
        Pending,
        Closed,
        Open
      }

Then Open > Closed > Pending

You can also use Jon Skeet’s answer to convert your string to an enum, if you can’t change the fact that you’re returning string.