Question

I want to use an anonymous type as source to a GridView. But it will be filtered first using a dropdownlist. Let me explain: I have a type I defined as follows:

    IEnumerable<object> data = new[]{
    new{Name="McClure Wallace", Id=1, Sal=10000d, Age=29}, 
    new{Name="John Jones", Id=2, Sal=12000d, Age=27}, 
    new{Name="Gloria Flowhart", Id=3,Sal=14000d, Age=21}
            . . .
    }; 

I use this as source to a dropdownlist:

    ddlEmployee.DataSource=data;
    ddlEmployee.DataTextField = "Name";
    ddlEmployee.DataValueField = "Id";
    ddlEmployee.DataBind();

When the user selects an item from the list I want to get the corresponding object and bind it in a Gridview:

    var sel = ddlEmployee.SelectedItem.ToString();

   var selData = from d in data where **d.Id= sel** select d;
   gvSearchResults.DataSource = selData;
   gvSearchResults.DataBind();

But the problem is that since I will get d as an object, it throws an error on d.Id.

How can I fix this. Please note that I may not be able to change definition of ‘data’ as this is controlled outside the app. I am only showing here for clarity.

Answer 1

Your problem is that you’re using Enumerable<object>. When you do your LINQ query it will say that Id is not part of object

Try this instead

var data = new[]{
new{Name="McClure Wallace", Id=1, Sal=10000d, Age=29}, 
new{Name="John Jones", Id=2, Sal=12000d, Age=27}, 
new{Name="Gloria Flowhart", Id=3,Sal=14000d, Age=21}
        . . .
};

Also, I don’t know if d.Id= sel is exaclty what you have (except for the *). If that’s the case you need to change a couple of things

1) sel is a string so you need to convert it to int

2) you need to use == to compare