Conversion of one object collection into another using Linq

In Today's example we will convert an object collection into another object collection using Linq.

As we have seen earlier, using Linq we can eliminate lot of coding effort and can save time also.

For current example i have created an employee collection which contains all the employee details. But some of the employees are authors also.

Now we have to populate an Author collection by filtering the authors from the employee collection.

//Employee class. For the employees who are author also, the //IsAuthor property contains true value

public class Employee

{       

  public string firstName;

  public string lastName;

  public bool IsAuthor;

  public string Country;

  public static ArrayList GetEmployees()

  {

    ArrayList oArrayList = new ArrayList();

    //adding employee details to the array list   

    oArrayList.Add(new Employee { firstName = "Rahul", lastName = "Gupta",Country="India", IsAuthor = true });

    oArrayList.Add(new Employee { firstName = "William", lastName = "Johns", Country = "United States", IsAuthor = true});

    oArrayList.Add(new Employee { firstName = "Stephen", lastName = "Smith", Country = "Australia", IsAuthor = true });

   
   return (oArrayList);

  }

}

//Author class 

public class Author

{

  public string AuthorName;

  public string Country;

  

  //This display method writes the output to the console window

  public static void DisplayAuthorDetails(Author[] objAuthors)

  {

   //looping through the collection

   foreach (Author c in objAuthors)

     Console.WriteLine("Author Name:  {0}  Country:  {1}", c.AuthorName, c.Country);

   Console.ReadLine();

  }

}

//Program class - which contains the Main method of execution

class Program

{

  static void Main(string[] args)

  {

   ArrayList alEmployees = Employee.GetEmployees();

   

   //Cast-Converts elements of an IEnumerable to specified type

   //Using Cast to convert Employee object to Author object

   //Where-filters a sequence of values based on predicate

   //Where is used to find all the authors from the employees collection

   Author[] objAuthors = alEmployees.Cast<Employee>()                               

                         .Where(e=> e.IsAuthor==false)

                         .Select(e => new Author { AuthorName = string.Format("{0} {1}",
                                 e.firstName, e.lastName), Country = e.Country})

                         .ToArray<Author>();

                               

   Author.DisplayAuthorDetails(objAuthors);

  }

}

Happy Coding......