Question

I’m trying to improve my program which currently builds a generic list of strings as follows:

 List<string> fileList = new List<string>(Directory.GetFiles(root, "*.xml", SearchOption.AllDirectories));

to a different generic list which is hopefully more flexible:

List<InputFileInfo> fileList = List<InputFileInfo>(Directory.GetFiles(root, "*.xml", SearchOption.AllDirectories));

 public class InputFileInfo
{
    public string _fullPath { get; set; }
    public string _Message { get; set; }
    public int _RowCount { get; set; }
    public InputFileInfo(string fName)
    {
        _fullPath = fName;
        _RowCount = 0;
        _Message = String.Empty;
    }
}

Directory.GetFiles returns a string array and I guess my InputFileInfo constructor is not sufficient. Do I need to loop thru a string array and populate List using an .Add method for each element of .GetFiles array or is there a way to populate my new List in one statement like the List of strings?

Answer 1

Yes – ideally with LINQ to Objects:

var fileList = Directory.GetFiles(root, "*.xml", SearchOption.AllDirectories);
                        .Select(name => new InputFileInfo(name))
                        .ToList();

If you haven’t come across LINQ yet, I strongly recommend that you look at it in detail. It’s ideal for this sort of thing.