Question

I need to return an IEnumerable.
Here is the working code:

public IEnumerable<String> ReturnStudentsAsString(int vak, int klasgroep)
    {
        return (from s in Students
                orderby s.Naam, s.Voornaam
                select s.Naam);
    }

That works perfect!
Now, I want to return the street and the postal code as well…
So I created an anonymous type:

public IEnumerable<String> ReturnStudentsAsString(int vak, int klasgroep)
    {
        var test = (from s in Studenten
                orderby s.Naam, s.Voornaam
                select new 
                {
                    StudentNumber = s.StudentNumber,
                    Name = s.Name,
                    Street = s.Street,
                    PostalCode = s.PostalCode,
                    City = s.City
                });
        return test;

But it gives me an error…
How could I fix it?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It is no longer an IEnumerable<String>. You’d have to return an IEnumerable<object> to pass the anonymous type back from your query.

Edit: As others have suggested, a better approach would probably be to define a static type to hold the values you want to return. Alternately, since this is basically a one-liner query, you could do it in-line wherever you’re using this method instead of creating a specialized method for it.