Nested IEnumerable/Arrays, how to access a deeply nested property

Question

So I have an IEnumerable object that contains a queue(list), each item contains 3 properties. One of those properties ("States") contains another array... and this array contains the property "Messages". Fairly confusing, that's why I took a photo of the local in debugging. Had to edit sensible data out.

I only have this IEnumerable object to work with. How do I reach the property "message"?

I already tried some Lambda expressions... Like

var _message = _criticalData.Select(item1 => item1.States.Select(item2 =>item2.Messages).ToArray()).ToArray()

Then I can create a new array/list of strings and foreach each _message into it.

Atleast I think it works (can't test it at home). But it would also be really really slow. Is there any other way to do this?

Answer 1

You have to flatten out multiple lists, so use SelectMany like:

string[] output = _criticalData.SelectMany(outer => 
                            outer.States.SelectMany(inner => inner.Messages))
                            .ToArray();