How do you sort a parent and child collection using Linq?

Question

I have the following basic classes (cut down for this question):

public class Parent
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public IList Chi         


        

Answer 1

First of all, calling OrderBy on the list, the way you do, won't sort it in-place. It will return a new sorted IEnumerable; you can use .ToList() on that to turn it into a list, but it will still be a copy. Now on to the sorting itself. You really need to not just order the items in the collection, but make a copy of each item which would have its Children sorted as well. So:

IList parents = ... //Populated

parents = (from p in parents
           orderby p.Name
           select new Parent
           {
               Name = p.Name,
               Children = p.Children.OrderBy(c => c.Name).ToList()
           }
          ).ToList();