Question

Wikipedia states that the Specification Pattern is where business logic can be recombined by chaining the business logic together using boolean logic. With respect to selecting filtering objects from lists or collections it seems to me that Dynamic LINQ allows me to accomplish the same thing. Am I missing something? Are there other benefits to the Specification Pattern that should be considered as well?

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Edit:

I’ve found some posts that discuss combining LINQ and the Specification Pattern:

Linq Specifications Project

Implementing the Specification Pattern via Linq by Nicloas Blumhardt (Autofac dude)

Has anyone gone done this road and did it become complicated to maintain?

Answer 1

Dynamic LINQ uses string expressions to allow the dynamic query construction. So we do in fact lose the type safety there. Whereas using wrapper patterns like the decorator pattern of it closely related incarnation, the specification pattern, allows us to maintain the type safety in code. I explore using the Decorator Pattern as query wrapper in order to reuse and dynamically build queries. You can find the article on code project at:
Linq Query Wrappers

Or you can check my blog.