Question

I’ve got two tables (articles and tags) that have a one-to-many relationship.

I remember seeing somewhere that I can create nested objects/arrays/etc from that relationship. The output of which I would like in a format such as (in JSON format):

{1 : {
    id : 1,
    title : 'article title',
    tags : ({
        id : 16,
        tagname : 'first tag'
    },{
        id : 23,
        tagname : 'another tag'
    })
}

I’m creating an internal knowledge base system with a list view similar to the front page of stack overflow (that’s the way I’d like to display the tags).

How would I go about doing this? A subquery? Thanks.

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly you’re looking for the SelectMany function which lets you ‘unroll’ nested structures like yours. SelectMany is indeed executed in Query syntax by a sub-query:

IEnumerable<Tag> = 
    from article in Articles
    from tag in article.Tags
    select tag;

In method form:

IEnumerable<Tag> tags = Articles.SelectMany(a => a.Tags);