I'm having some trouble figuring out the best way to do this, and I would appreciate any help.
Basically, I'm setting up a filter that allows the user to look at a history of audit items associated with an arbitrary "filter" of usernames.
The datasource is a SQL Server data base, so I'm taking the IQueryable "source" (either a direct table reference from the db context object, or perhaps an IQueryable that's resulted from additional queries), applying the WHERE filter, and then returning the resultant IQueryable object....but I'm a little stumped as to how to perform OR using this approach.
I've considered going the route of Expressions because I know how to OR those, but I haven't been able to figure out quite how to do that with a "Contains" type evaluation, so I'm currently using a UNION, but I'm afraid this might have negative impact on performance, and I'm wondering if it may not give me exactly what I need if other filters (in addition to user name filtering shown here) are added in an arbirary order.
Here is my sample code:
public override IQueryable<X> ApplyFilter<X>(IQueryable<X> source)
{
// Take allowed values...
List<string> searchStrings = new List<string>();
// <SNIP> (This just populates my list of search strings)
IQueryable<X> oReturn = null;
// Step through each iteration, and perform a 'LIKE %value%' query
string[] searchArray = searchStrings.ToArray();
for (int i = 0; i < searchArray.Length; i++)
{
string value = searchArray[i];
if (i == 0)
// For first step, perform direct WHERE
oReturn = source.Where(x => x.Username.Contains(value));
else
// For additional steps, perform UNION on WHERE
oReturn = oReturn.Union(source.Where(x => x.Username.Contains(value)));
}
return oReturn ?? source;
}
This feels like the wrong way to do things, but it does seem to work, so my question is first, is there a better way to do this? Also, is there a way to do a 'Contains' or 'Like' with Expressions?
(Editted to correct my code: In rolling back to working state in order to post it, I apparently didn't roll back quite far enough :) )
=============================================
ETA: Per the solution given, here is my new code (in case anyone reading this is interested):
public override IQueryable<X> ApplyFilter<X>(IQueryable<X> source)
{
List<string> searchStrings = new List<string>(AllowedValues);
// <SNIP> build collection of search values
string[] searchArray = searchStrings.ToArray();
Expression<Func<X, bool>> expression = PredicateBuilder.False<X>();
for (int i = 0; i < searchArray.Length; i++)
{
string value = searchArray[i];
expression = expression.Or(x => x.Username.Contains(value));
}
return source.Where(expression);
}
(One caveat I noticed: Following the PredicateBuilder's example, an empty collection of search strings will return false (false || value1 || ... ), whereas in my original version, I was assuming an empty list should just coallesce to the unfiltered source. As I thought about it more, the new version seems to make more sense for my needs, so I adopted that)
=============================================
See Question&Answers more detail:
os