Question

I’ve got some data in a table that looks like so:

Recipe | Category | Email

What I’d like to do is pull this data back from the source and put it into something that looks like so:

public class RecipeItem
{
   public long Recipe { get; set; }
   public long Category { get; set; }
   public List<string> Names {get; set; }
}

Grouping by the Recipe and Category ids and putting all the emails that into the list.

So, what I’ve tried is to do something like this:

var recipeItems =
   from entry in list
   group entry by new { entry.Recipe, entry.Category}
   into aRecipe
   select new RecipeItem()
              {
                 Recipe = aRecipe.Key.Recipe,
                 Category = aRecipe.Key.Category,
                 // ? Not sure how to stick the list of names in here
              };

list is the data pulled back via entity framework.

But this isn’t quite right – I think I’m close here (maybe). What am I missing here on this?

---

Follow-up:

Thanks to Aducci for clearing this up. The answer is that you can do this:

Names = aRecipe.Select(x => x.Name)

and this will add all those Names which are in each group into the Names collection for that group. Pretty nifty.

Answer 1

I would modify your class to look like this

public class RecipeItem
{
   public long Recipe { get; set; }
   public long Category { get; set; }    
   public IEnumerable<string> Names {get; set; }      
}

And your link to entities query to:

var recipeItems =
   from entry in list
   group entry by new { entry.Recipe, entry.Category}
   into aRecipe
   select new RecipeItem()
              {
                 Recipe = aRecipe.Key.Recipe,
                 Category = aRecipe.Key.Category,
                 Names = aRecipe.Select(x => x.Name)
              };