I have a List of books- each book has a category – i want to find out all the unique categories involved, given a list of books- i knew i could do this with linq, but not quite sure how!
It turned out to be easy..
List<Category> categories = _books.Select(i => i.Category).Distinct();
There was a minor complication however- Distinct obviously needs to be able to compare different instances of Category- you can supply a delegate to a custom EquityComparer class- otherwise it will simply check if this is the same instance of the object, which will (probably) always come back false rendering your distinct useless. So i created this;
public class CategoryComparer : IEqualityComparer<Category>
{
public bool Equals(Category x, Category y)
{
return x.Id == y.Id;
}
public int GetHashCode(Category obj)
{
return obj.Id.GetHashCode();
}
}
then updated my linq to use it..
List<Category> categories = _books.Select(i => i.Category).Distinct(new CategoryComparer());
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