how to check that a list contains another list C#

Question

I have two List of domain entities,

First one is Item List, Structure:

string ItemID;
string ItemName;
int Qty;
double price;

Another one is Offer List, Structure:

int OfferID;
string ItemID;
int OfferPrice;

Having two variables like this,

List<DomainEntities.Items> ItemList=new List<DomainEntities.Items>();
List<DomainEntities.Offers> OfferList=new List<DomainEntities.Offers>();

Now i wanted to filter from ItemList.ItemID property which contains OfferList.ItemID, Output should be List.

How to do this filtration? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can do this

ItemList.Where(item => OfferList.Any(offer => offer.ItemID == item.ItemID)).ToList();

You can also do this (may perform faster)

ItemList.Join(OfferList, item => item.ItemID, offer => offer.ItemID, (item, offer) => item).ToList();

Answer 2

If the lists get large (more than 100 elements each), you should look into a faster lookup strategy, such as the one offered by HashSet<T> .

List<DomainEntities.Items> itemList = new List<DomainEntities.Items>();
List<DomainEntities.Offers> offerList = new List<DomainEntities.Offers>();

var offerSet = new HashSet<string>(offerList.Select(o => o.ItemID));
var output = itemList.Where(item => offerSet.Contains(item.ItemID)).ToList();

The advantage of HashSet<T> is that it offers constant performance on lookups, irrespective of its size. Thus, if itemList contains m elements and offerList contains n elements, the code above will require roughly n operations to build the hash set, but then only takes 1 step to compare any item against it. Thus, it would take a total of m steps to filter all elements of itemList against it.

By contrast, calling offerList.Any requires iterating through its elements each time, effectively resulting in a nested loop. Thus, that approach would require a total of m × n steps, rather than m + n . This becomes significant for large collections -- if the two lists contain 1,000 elements each, the HashSet<T> approach would take 2,000 steps, whilst the nested loop would take 1,000,000 steps. (I am using the term "steps" loosely here; I'm actually referring to algorithmic complexity .)

The Join operator offers a similar optimization to HashSet<T> under the hood.