Sort a list of elements based on string value in element-CodePudding

I have a list of arrays that have a value called status. I want to sort these by placing the arrays with the "Active" status to the front of the list. This is to display the active elements first in a later function. Any good ideas how to sort and place the active "contracts" first?

IEnumerable<Contract> mappedContracts = MapContractsToContracts(contracts);
mappedContracts.OrderBy(x => x.Status == "Active");
return mappedContracts.ToList();

CodePudding user response：

Presuming Status is a string and other statuses are not alphabetically before "Active".

IEnumerable<Contract> mappedContracts = MapContractsToContracts(contracts);
return mappedContracts
    .OrderBy(x => x.Status)
    .ToList();

For a more rugged approach, in MapContractsToContracts you could convert the status string to an Enum or custom type that had its own implementation of IComparable. In that way, you could define the precedence and order of statuses and verify that the data from the API met your expectations.

CodePudding user response：

As @Jodrell's answer is correct for your specific scenario, I think a good idea to make it a bit more general is to use an enum instead of string for the status property.

public enum Status
    {
        Active = 0,
        Deactive = 1,
    }

Then you should change your model:

public class Contract 
{
   ...

   public Status Status {get; set;}

   ...
}

Then you can use the below query, and be sure that contracts with Active status will always come first.

IEnumerable<Contract> mappedContracts = MapContractsToContracts(contracts);
return mappedContracts
    .OrderBy(x => x.Status)
    .ToList();

Good Luck.