System.LINQ.Dynamic: Select(” new (…)”) into a List (or any other enumerable collection of )

First, you’ll access the current grouped value as Key in your Select clause:

.Select("new (Key as Group, Sum(Value) as TotalValue)");

That should make your query work. The harder question is how to turn the returned objects, which will have a dynamically generated type that inherits from DynamicClass, into a static type.

Option 1: Use reflection to access the dynamic object’s Group and TotalValue properties.

Option 2: Use compiled expression trees for lightweight code generation to access the Group and TotalValue properties.

Option 3: Modify the Dynamic library to support a strongly-typed result. This turns out to be rather simple:

  1. In ExpressionParser.Parse(), capture the type argument in a private field:

    private Type newResultType;
    public Expression Parse(Type resultType)
    {
        newResultType = resultType;
        int exprPos = token.pos;
        // ...
    
  2. Near the end of ExpressionParser.ParseNew(), we’ll try to use newResultType before defaulting to a dynamic type:

    Expression ParseNew()
    {
        // ...
        NextToken();
        Type type = newResultType ?? DynamicExpression.CreateClass(properties);
        MemberBinding[] bindings = new MemberBinding[properties.Count];
        for (int i = 0; i < bindings.Length; i++)
            bindings[i] = Expression.Bind(type.GetProperty(properties[i].Name), expressions[i]);
        return Expression.MemberInit(Expression.New(type), bindings);
    }
    
  3. Finally, we need a strongly typed version of Select():

    public static IQueryable<TResult> Select<TResult>(this IQueryable source, string selector, params object[] values)
    {
        if (source == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("source");
        if (selector == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("selector");
        LambdaExpression lambda = DynamicExpression.ParseLambda(source.ElementType, typeof(TResult), selector, values);
        return source.Provider.CreateQuery<TResult>(
            Expression.Call(
                typeof(Queryable), "Select",
                new Type[] { source.ElementType, typeof(TResult) },
                source.Expression, Expression.Quote(lambda)));
    }
    

    The only changes from the original Select() are places we reference TResult.

Now we just need a named type to return:

    public class Result
    {
        public string Group { get; set; }
        public double TotalValue { get; set; }
    }

And your updated query will look like this:

    IQueryable<Result> res = table1.AsQueryable()
        .GroupBy(groupbyvalue, "it")
        .Select<Result>("new (Key as Group, Sum(Value) as TotalValue)");

Leave a Comment