Question

I’m new to LINQ and am having a problem. I have a file that looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Galleries>
   <Gallery ID="10C31804CEDB42693AADD760C854ABD" Title="Test1">
      <Description>The first test gallery.  Picture of a cat and Wilford Brimley.  Can you tell the difference?</Description>
      <Images>
         <Image Title="t1Image1" FileName="tcats.jpg" />
         <Image Title="t1Image2" FileName="twb.jpg" />
      </Images>
   </Gallery>
   <Gallery ID="0420EC15405B488E1E0F157AC823A6" Title="Test2">
      <Description>The second test gallery.  A large image of Wilford Brimley and various cats.  The cats will be on the right.</Description>
      <Images>
         <Image Title="t2Image1" FileName="wilfordbrimley.jpg" />
      </Images>
   </Gallery>
</Galleries> 

Anyway, I know the ID of the Gallery I want, but I want to choose one of the images at random. Is there a LINQ statement that can do this?

Answer 1

Can you order the Images in the gallery by Random.Next() then select out the first element.

I dont know much about linq2xml but here’s what i came up with

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Random rnd = new Random();
    XDocument galleries = XDocument.Load(@"C:\Users\John Boker\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\ConsoleApplication1\ConsoleApplication1\Galleries.xml");
    var image = (from g in galleries.Descendants("Gallery")
                 where g.Attribute("ID").Value == "10C31804CEDB42693AADD760C854ABD"
                 select g.Descendants("Images").Descendants("Image").OrderBy(r=>rnd.Next()).First()).First();
    Console.WriteLine(image);
    Console.ReadLine();
}

I’m sure the selecting could be done a lot differently, but that’s what i did to make it work with the random.next thing.