Question

I have two List of two different custom types. Both types share 2 common properties.

For example:

List<foo>;
List<bar>;

They both have properties, for example, named Name and Age.

I want to return a new List containing all bar objects, where the Name and Age properties of bar are present in any of the foo objects.
What would be the best way to do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Assuming the shared properties implement equality etc properly, you might want to do something like:

// In an extensions class somewhere. This should really be in the standard lib.
// We need it for the sake of type inference.
public static HashSet<T> ToHashSet<T>(this IEnumerable<T> items)
{
    return new HashSet<T>(items);
}

var shared = foos.Select(foo => new { foo.SharedProperty1, foo.SharedProperty2 })
                 .ToHashSet();

var query = bars.Where(bar => shared.Contains(new { bar.SharedProperty1,
                                                    bar.SharedProperty2 }));

The other options using joins will certainly work – but I find this clearer for the expressing the idea that you only want to look at each bar entry once, even if there are several foo items with that property.