Question

I’m a fairly junior C# developer so excuse me if this is trivial, but I am coming up with this error “invalid initializer member declarator” at the line of code I indicate below.

Can someone explain what this means and how do I work around/achieve this result? All of my data annotations are already applied once in PODetail, which is why I didn’t want to repeat the properties here as well.

public class PODetailsListViewModel : IViewModelList<PODetail, PODetailsListViewModel>, IEntity
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }

        public string EntityDescription
        {
            get
            { return this.Id.ToString(); }
        }

        public PODetail PODetail { get; set; }


        public IEnumerable<PODetailsListViewModel> ConvertClassToViewModel(IEnumerable<PODetail> poDetails)
        {
            IEnumerable<PODetailsListViewModel> contactGrid =
                from l in poDetails.ToList()
                select new PODetailsListViewModel()
                {
                    Id = l.Id,
                    PODetail.POHeaderId = l.POHeaderId, <===== ERROR on this Line
                    ....
                };

            return contactGrid;
        }

Answer 1

You can’t access complex object properties in a class initializer like that (as you are attempting with the PODetail.POHeaderId property). You might have to implement a small workaround: create a collection of anonymous objects with the information you have already, then reconstruct a concrete list of PODetailsListViewModels right afterwards:

var contactGrid = from l in poDetails.ToList()
                  select new {
                  {
                       Id = l.Id,
                       POHeaderId = l.POHeaderId
                       ...
                  };

And then you can manually recreate what you’re looking for:

var someNewCollection = New List(Of PODetailsListViewModel);
foreach (var item in contactGrid)
    var model = new PODetailsListViewModel()
    {
         Id = item.Id
    };
    model.PODetail = new PODetailModel() /* replace with actual class name */
    {
        POHeaderId = item.POHeaderId
    };
    someNewCollection.Add(model);
}
return someNewCollection;

EDIT: Or perhaps you could nest the initializers:

var contactGrid = from l in poDetails.ToList()
                  select new PODetailsListViewModel() {
                  {
                       Id = l.Id,
                       PODetail = new PODetailModel()
                       {
                           POHeaderId = l.POHeaderId
                       },
                       ...
                  };