How do I sort a List of Dictionaries based off of a value in a key within the Dictionary in C# .NET Silverlight?

Question

So I have a List of Dictionary<string, string> dict and I want to sort the List alphabetically off the dict["Title"] value.

How do I go about doing that?

And, what if I want to take the value of dict["Title"] , modify it as string title = dict["Title"] + "xyz"; , and then use the modified title as the sorting value of that dict (without actually changing dict["Title"] )...

How would I go about doing that as well?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Linq it:

var dicts = new List<Dictionary<string, string>>();

var sort = dicts.OrderBy(x => x.ContainsKey("Title") ? x["Title"] : string.Empty);
var sort2 = dicts.OrderBy(x => x.ContainsKey("Title") ? x["Title"] + "xyz" : string.Empty);

Answer 2

It seems like you are trying to say something like this:

List<Dictionary<string, string>> list;

And what you want to do is something like

list.Sort();

But not quite. So, what you can do instead is either make a wrapper class for Dictionary<string, string> and then overload the compare methods, or you could make a comparison method like

static int CompareDicts(Dictionary<string, string> x, Dictionary<string, string> y) {
  return String.Compare(x["Title"],y["Title"]);
}

or

static int CompareDicts(Dictionary<string, string> x, Dictionary<string, string> y) {
  return String.Compare(x["Title"]+"xyz",y["Title"]+"xyz");
}

And then to sort

list.Sort(CompareDicts);

Edit: For a bunch of Sort functions on a List, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3da4abas.aspx

Answer 3

var dicts = new List<Dictionary<string, string>>();

// populate dictionaries.

var sorted = dicts.OrderBy(x => x.ContainsKey("Title") ? x["Title"] : string.Empty));

Answer 4

LINQ is the solution here.

dictionary.OrderBy(o => o.Key)
dictionary.OrderByDescending(o => o.Key)

And for the modified version

dictionary.OrderBy(o => o.Key + "xyz")
dictionary.OrderByDescending(o => o.Key + "xyz")