Question

This is easy for me to perform in TSQL, but I’m just sitting here banging my head against the desk trying to get it to work in EF4!

I have a table, lets call it TestData. It has fields, say: DataTypeID, Name, DataValue.

DataTypeID, Name, DataValue
1,"Data 1","Value1"
1,"Data 1","Value2"
2,"Data 1","Value3"
3,"Data 1","Value4"

I want to group on DataID/Name, and concatenate DataValue into a CSV string. The desired result should contain –

DataTypeID, Name, DataValues
1,"Data 1","Value1,Value2"
2,"Data 1","Value3"
3,"Data 1","Value4"

Now, here’s how I’m trying to do it –

var query = (from t in context.TestData
  group h by new { DataTypeID = h.DataTypeID, Name = h.Name } into g
  select new
 {
   DataTypeID = g.Key.DataTypeID,
   Name = g.Key.Name,
   DataValues = (string)g.Aggregate("", (a, b) => (a != "" ? "," : "") + b.DataValue),
 }).ToList()

The problem is that LINQ to Entities does not know how to convert this into SQL. This is part of a union of 3 LINQ queries, and I’d really like it to keep it that way. I imagine that I could retrieve the data and then perform the aggregate later. For performance reasons, that wouldn’t work for my app. I also considered using a SQL server function. But that just doesn’t seem “right” in the EF4 world.

Anyone care to take a crack at this?

Answer 1

Thanks to moi_meme for the answer. What I was hoping to do is NOT POSSIBLE with LINQ to Entities. As others have suggested, you have to use LINQ to Objects to get access to string manipulation methods.

See the link posted by moi_meme for more info.

Update 8/27/2018 – Updated Link (again) – https://web.archive.org/web/20141106094131/http://www.mythos-rini.com/blog/archives/4510

And since I’m taking flack for a link-only answer from 8 years ago, I’ll clarify just in case the archived copy disappears some day. The basic gist of it is that you cannot access string.join in EF queries. You must create the LINQ query, then call ToList() in order to execute the query against the db. Then you have the data in memory (aka LINQ to Objects), so you can access string.join.

The suggested code from the referenced link above is as follows –

var result1 = (from a in users
                b in roles
           where (a.RoleCollection.Any(x => x.RoleId = b.RoleId))
           select new 
           {
              UserName = a.UserName,
              RoleNames = b.RoleName)                 
           });

var result2 = (from a in result1.ToList()
           group a by a.UserName into userGroup
           select new 
           {
             UserName = userGroup.FirstOrDefault().UserName,
             RoleNames = String.Join(", ", (userGroup.Select(x => x.RoleNames)).ToArray())
           });

The author further suggests replacing string.join with aggregate for better performance, like so –

RoleNames = (userGroup.Select(x => x.RoleNames)).Aggregate((a,b) => (a + ", " + b))