Question

The solutions I have found so far in my research on comparing lists of objects have usually generated a new list of objects, say of those items existing in one list, but not in the other. In my case, I want to compare two lists to discover the items whose key exists in one list and not the other (comparing both ways), and for those keys found in both lists, checking whether the value is the same or different.

The object being compared has multiple properites that constitute the key, plus a property that constitutes the value, and finally, an enum property that describes the result of the comparison, e.g., {Equal, NotEqual, NoMatch, NotYetCompared}. So my object might look like:

class MyObject
{
   //Key combination
   string columnA;
   string columnB;
   decimal columnC;

   //The Value
   decimal columnD;

   //Enum for comparison, used for styling the item (value hidden from UI)
   //Alternatively...this could be a string type, holding the enum.ToString()
   MyComparisonEnum result;
}

These objects are collected into two ObservableCollection<MyObject> to be compared. When bound to the UI, the grid rows are being styled based on the caomparison result enum, so the user can easily see what keys are in the new dataset but not in the old, vice-versa, along with those keys in both datasets with a different value. Both lists are presented in the UI in data grids, with the rows styled based on the comparison result.

Would LINQ be suitable as a tool to solve this efficiently, or should I use loops to scan the lists and break out when the key is found, etc (a solution like this comes naturally to be from my procedural programming background)… or some other method?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You can use Except and Intersect:

var list1 = new List<MyObject>();
var list2 = new List<MyObject>();
// initialization code 
var notIn2 = list1.Except(list2);
var notIn1 = list2.Except(list1);
var both = list1.Intersect(list2);

To find objects with different values (ColumnD) you can use this (quite efficient) Linq query:

var diffValue = from o1 in list1
                join o2 in list2
                on new { o1.columnA, o1.columnB, o1.columnC } equals new { o2.columnA, o2.columnB, o2.columnC }
                where o1.columnD != o2.columnD
                select new { Object1 = o1, Object2 = o2 };

foreach (var diff in diffValue)
{
    MyObject obj1 = diff.Object1;
    MyObject obj2 = diff.Object2;
    Console.WriteLine("Obj1-Value:{0} Obj2-Value:{1}", obj1.columnD, obj2.columnD);
}

when you override Equals and GetHashCode appropriately:

class MyObject
{
    //Key combination
    string columnA;
    string columnB;
    decimal columnC;

    //The Value
    decimal columnD;

    //Enum for comparison, used for styling the item (value hidden from UI)
    //Alternatively...this could be a string type, holding the enum.ToString()
    MyComparisonEnum result;

    public override bool Equals(object obj)
    {
        if (obj == null || !(obj is MyObject)) return false;
        MyObject other = (MyObject)obj;
        return columnA.Equals(other.columnA) && columnB.Equals(other.columnB) && columnC.Equals(other.columnC);
    }

    public override int GetHashCode()
    {
        int hash = 19;
        hash = hash + (columnA ?? "").GetHashCode();
        hash = hash + (columnB ?? "").GetHashCode();
        hash = hash + columnC.GetHashCode();
        return hash;
    }
}