Latest posts
Two cute programmer jokes
Two programming-related jokes that amused me
Bjarne Stroustrup on computers and telephones
" I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone ."
Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup
Solving the anonymous types problem with tuples
One of my first posts on this blog was about the problem of using anonymous types when you want to send the data outside of your current class. At the time, the only way I knew to solve this was to create a simple class that had the structure of the anonymous type, and create one of these instead of the anonymous type. I do this regularly, although I have taken to naming such classes CustomerOverview, OrderOverview, etc, instead of CustomerTmp as I did in that blog post, as they aren't really temporary classes at all, they are slim, flattened overviews of the class.
This approach works well, but it can have its downsides. One, as mentioned in that post, is that it is easy to end up with a proliferation of classes, many of which may only be used in one location in the code. If the classes represent lightweight views of entities in the model (such as the two examples shown above), then I don't worry about this, as it is clear what they represent, and it's fairly certain that I'll end up using them somewhere else at some point.
Persuading the Entity Framework to sort a child collection part II
I previously blogged about a seemingly innocent LINQ problem that had me baffled for ages, which was how you sort or filter an entity’s child collection in Linq. For example, if you want to pull a collection of customers, and include all of their orders from this year, but none from earlier, then there doesn’t seem to be a simple way to do this in Linq. You need to do the query in two stages, the first which builds an anonymous type, and the second which links the to parts of it together. See that post for more details.
I also blogged about the problem of Linq not including child entities when doing joins, which requires you to cast the query to an ObjectQuery so you can use the Include() method on it.
The problem comes when you want to combine the two methods, meaning that your query needs to be constructed in two stages to ensure that the sorting or filtering of the child collection is done correctly, but you also need to cast the final result to an ObjectQuery before you send it out over WCF. The problem arises because you need to enumerate the query before doing the Include(), as that is the only way to ensure that the sorting is done, but calling AsEnumerable() gives you an IEnumerable (reasonably enough), which can't be cast to an ObjectQuery! So what's a fellow to do? Good question, and one that had me going for ages.