Question

This is my method that is giving the error.

public List<StatusViewModel> GetStatuses(){
    using(var ctx = new AppStatusEntities()){

          var result = ctx.GetLatestStatuses().Select(r => new StatusViewModel
            { 
                r.ApplicationId,
                r.ApplicationName,
                r.ApplicationStatus,
                r.LastRun                   
            }).ToList();

          return result;
    }
}

StatusViewModel is a POCO.

public class StatusViewModel{
    public Guid ApplicationId {get;set;}
    public string ApplicationName {get;set;}
    public string ApplicationStatus {get;set;}
    public DateTime LastRun {get;set;}        
}

The error message is

Cannot initialize type 'StatusViewModel' with a collection initializer because it does not implement 'System.Collections.IEnumerable'

I can only assume it has something to do with the return type of the stored procedure call being a “complex” as specified when I imported the function in the Entity Data Model. But I cannot figure out why that would matter. If I do something like ctx.ApplicationStatus.Select(r => new StatusViewModel {... where ApplicationStatus is a table and not a stored procedure call, then that code will compile without errors.

Answer 1

Try it this way:

var result = ctx.GetLatestStatuses().Select(r => new StatusViewModel
        { 
            ApplicationId = r.ApplicationId,
            ApplicationName = r.ApplicationName,
            ApplicationStatus = r.ApplicationStatus,
            LastRun = r.LastRun                   
        }).ToList();

The difference between your stored procedure call and direct access to ObjectSet is Linq implementation. Your first example with stored procedure uses projection your application using Linq-to-Objects whereas the second example uses projection in SQL using Linq-to-entities.