Question

I’ve currently got this sample table of data:

ID  | Policy ID     |   History ID  | Policy name
1   |   1           |    0          | Test
2   |   1           |    1          | Test
3   |   2           |    0          | Test1
4   |   2           |    1          | Test1

Out of this, I want to group by the Policy ID and History ID (MAX), so the records I want to be kept are ID’s 2 and 4:

   ID   | Policy ID     |   History ID  | Policy name
    2   |   1           |    1          | Test
    4   |   2           |    1          | Test1

I’ve tried to do this in LINQ and stumbling on the same issue every time. I can group my entities, but always into a group where I have to re-define the properties, rather than have them kept from my Policy objects. Such as:

var policies = _context.Policies.GroupBy(a => a.intPolicyId)
                                            .Select(group => new {
                                                PolicyID = group.Key,
                                                HistoryID = group.Max(a => a.intHistoryID)
                                            });

This simply just brings out a list of objects which have “Policy ID” and “History ID” within them. I want all the properties returned from the Policies object, without having to redefine them all, as there are around 50+ properties in this object.

I tried:

        var policies = _context.Policies.GroupBy(a => a.intPolicyId)
                                                    .Select(group => new {
                                                        PolicyID = group.Key,
                                                        HistoryID = group.Max(a => a.intHistoryID)
                                                        PolicyObject = group;
                                                    });

But this errors out.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Group by composite key

_context.Policies.GroupBy(a => new {a.intPolicyId, *other fields*}).Select(
    group=> new {
        PolicyId = group.Key.intPolicyId,
        HistoryId = group.Max(intHistoryId),
        *other fields*
    }
);

Another way – grab histories, than join back with the rest of the data, something like this (won’t work out of the box, will require some refining)

var historyIDs = _context.Policies.GroupBy(a=>a.intPolicyId).Select(group => new {
                                            PolicyID = group.Key,
                                            HistoryID = group.Max(a => a.intHistoryID)
                                        });

var finalData = from h in historyIDs
                join p in _context.Policies on h.intPolicyId equals p.intPolicyId
                select new {h.HistoryId, *all other policy fields*}

And yet another way, even simpler and not require a lot of typing :):

var historyIDs = _context.Policies.GroupBy(a=>a.intPolicyId).Select(group => new {
                                            PolicyID = group.Key,
                                            HistoryID = group.Max(a => a.intHistoryID)
                                        });

var finalData = from h in historyIDs
                join p in _context.Policies on h.PolicyId equals p.intPolicyId && h.HistoryId equals p.HistoryId
                select p

Basically it’s somewhat equivalent to the following SQL query:

select p.*
from Policy p
inner join (
    select pi.policyId, max(pi.historyId)
    from Policy pi
    group by pi.policyId
) pp on pp.policyId = p.policyId and pp.historyId = p.historyId