Question

I have simple set of objects stored in RavenDB:

public class Question
{
    public string Id { get; set; }
    public DateTime CreatedOn { get; set; }
    public ICollection<User> Supporters { get; set; }
    public ICollection<Answer> Answers { get; set; }
}

public class Answer 
{
    public string Id { get; set; }
    public bool IsOfficial { get; set; }
}

Now I want to query RavenDB to give me set of questions, ordered firstly by number of supporters, next by condition – if a question has any official answer, and in the and, by question creation date. So I’ve written a query:

var questions = DocumentSession.Query<Question>().AsQueryable(); 
questions = questions
                .OrderByDescending(x => x.Supporters.Count)
                .ThenByDescending(x => x.Answers.Any(a => a.IsOfficial)) //EDIT: source of exception
                .ThenByDescending(x => x.CreatedOn)
                .Take(15);                
var result = questions.ToList();

which throws an exception:

System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type 'System.Linq.Expressions.MethodCallExpressionN' to type 'System.Linq.Expressions.MemberExpression'

The query is logically correct and works, when I use linq-to-objects, and simply add .ToList() to first line:

var questions = DocumentSession.Query<Question>().Tolist().AsQueryable();
// next lines stay unchanged

I don’t want to do it because of performance issues (this change forces all questions to be loaded from database into memory before filtering).

How to make this working without performance impact ? Maybe shell I define an index ? How it should looks like then ?

Answer 1

Based on Bear Alexander response, I’ve done this like that:

public class QuestionByAnyOfficial : AbstractIndexCreationTask<Question, QuestionByAnyOfficial.Result>
{
    public class Result
    {
        public string Id;
        public bool AnyOfficial;
        public int SupportersCount;
        public DateTime CreatedOn;
    }

    public QuestionByAnyOfficial()
    {
        Map = questions => from question in questions                               
                           select new
                              {
                                  Id = question.Id,                                              
                                  AnyOfficial = question.Answers.Any(a => a.IsOfficial),
                                  SupportersCount = question.Supporters.Count,
                                  CreatedOn = question.CreatedOn
                              };            
    }
}

var questionIds = DocumentSession.Query<QuestionByAnyOfficial.Result, QuestionByAnyOfficial>()
                       .OrderByDescending(x => x.SupportersCount)
                       .ThenByDescending(x => x.AnyOfficial)
                       .ThenByDescending(x => x.CreatedOn)
                       .Take(NumberOfQuestions)
                       .Select(x => x.Id);
var questions = DocumentSession.Load<Question>(questionIds);
var result = questions.ToList();

It works and I believe it is more efficient than my original version. If it can be done in any more elegant way, I’d appreciate any ideas. Regards.