Search Extensions - Search within child collections now supported in v1.7

Search child collections

I received a request from a user who wondered if SearchExtensions could do something like the functionality described as follows:

Given I have a collection of Shops
I want to return all Shops that stock a Product with a Name containing "foot"

This feature is now available in the latest release via a new method, .SearchChildren(). Currently this is only available for LinqToObjects, not LinqToEntities (yet):

var shops = allShops.SearchChildren(s => s.Products)
                    .With(p => p.Name, p => p.Desc)
                    .Containing("foot", "feet");

The above returns shops that contain any product that has the term "foot" or "feet" in it's Name or Description fields.

Support has also been added to allow searching child collections for matches on other types. The following example returns shops who have products with a price greater than 10,000:

var shops = allShops.SearchChildren(s => s.Products)
                    .With(p => p.Price)
                    .GreaterThan(10000m);

Both the above examples will return a collection of Shops where any of it's products match the given criteria.

The equivalent of the first example in LinqToObjects would be something like:

var shops = allShops.Where(s => s.Products.Any(p => p.Name.Contains("foot")
                                                 || p.Name.Contains("feet")
                                                 || p.Desc.Contains("foot")
                                                 || p.Desc.Contains("feet")))

Additional comparisons available

Other string comparisons available for normal searching are also available for searching children, such as:

• .StartsWith() - property starts with any of the given terms
• .EndsWith() - property ends with any of the given terms
• .EqualTo() - property is equal to any of the given terms
• .Containing() - property contains any of the given terms
• .ContainingAll() - property contains all of the given terms

Non string comparisons have also been implemented when searching child collections:

• .GreaterThan()
• .GreaterThanOrEqualTo()
• .LessThan()
• .LessThanOrEqualTo()

Searching across multiple children

The ability to search across multiple children (of the same type) is also supported. Consider the following (contrived) example:

I want to return all `parents` who have a `Son` OR a `Daughter` with a `Forename` or `Nickname` beginning with 'A', 'E', 'I', 'O' or 'U'

The Model

public class Parent
{
  public IEnumerable<Child> Sons { get; private set; }
  public IEnumerable<Child> Daughters { get; private set; }
}

public class Child
{
  public int Age {get; private set;}
  public string Forename {get; private set;}
  public string Nickname {get; private set;}
  public string Surname {get; private set;}
}

Performing the search

Given a list of parents I could now do the following:

var result = parents.SearchChildren(p => p.Sons, p => p.Daughters)
                    .With(c => Forname, c => c.NickName)
                    .StartsWith("A", "E", "I", "O", "U");

The result

The result of this search is a collection of parents who have a son or a daughter with a forename or surname beginning with a vowel.

Note that all of a parents children will still be present for each parent.

The filter is performed against the parent but the conditions are against the children.

---

Thanks to @bzbetty for getting in touch via a github issues.

This feature was not something I would have completed without his request as I had not seen or envisaged a need for it.

If you have a new feature request, please get in touch by adding a comment below, contact me on twitter (@ninjanye) or you can raise an issue on the github project page

To install SearchExtensions, you can either install it via the Nuget Package manager or by using the following in the package manager console

<p class="nuget-badge"><code>PM> Install-Package NinjaNye.SearchExtensions</code></p>