Question

I’m having trouble sorting a list of user profiles which I am passing to the view. I want to display the list of all users in a certain role and I want to sort them by familyName attribute.

I tried using OrderBy but it has no effect.

Code in the controller

public ActionResult Index()
    {
        //get all patients
        var patients = Roles.GetUsersInRole("user").ToList();
        //set up list of patient profiles
        List<UserProfile> pprofiles = new List<UserProfile>();
        foreach (var i in patients) {
            pprofiles.Add(ZodiacPRO.Models.UserProfile.GetUserProfile(i));
        }
        pprofiles.OrderBy(x => x.familyName);   //<-this has no effect the list produced is
                                                // exactly the same it was without this line
        return View(pprofiles);
    }

And the View

   <ul id= "patientList">

        @foreach (var m in Model)
            {
                <li>
                <ul class="patient">
                 <li class="ptitle">@m.title</li>
                 <li class="pname"> @Html.ActionLink(@m.givenName + " " + @m.familyName, "View", "Account", new { @username = @m.UserName.ToString() }, new { id = "try" })</li>
                 <li class="pprofile">@Ajax.ActionLink("Profile", "PatientSummary", new { @username = @m.UserName }, new AjaxOptions { UpdateTargetId = "pContent"},new{ @class = "profpic" })</li>
                </ul>
                </li>         
            }
    </ul>

I will need to reuse this in more than one place and there could be a large number of users so not ordering them in someway would be terrible. How should I go about this?

Answer 1

pprofiles.OrderBy(x => x.familyName); will return an IEnumerable<T>, not sorting the array where it was called on.

You can change your code like this :

public ActionResult Index()
{
    //get all patients
    var patients = Roles.GetUsersInRole("user").ToList();
    //set up list of patient profiles

    List<UserProfile> pprofiles = new List<UserProfile>();
    foreach (var i in patients) {
        pprofiles.Add(ZodiacPRO.Models.UserProfile.GetUserProfile(i));
    }       
    var ordered = pprofiles .OrderBy(x => x.familyName);   

    return View(ordered );
}

Or in a more Linq-styled way :

var orderedPatients = Roles.GetUsersInRole("user")
                           .Select(u=>ZodiacPRO.Models.UserProfile.GetUserProfile(u))
                           .OrderBy(u=>u.FamilyName);


return View(orderedPatients);

Or :

var orderedPatients = from u in Roles.GetUsersInRole("user")
                      let userProfile = ZodiacPRO.Models.UserProfile.GetUserProfile(u)
                      order by userProfile.FamilyName
                      select userProfile;
return View(orderedPatients);