Recursively (?) compose LINQ predicates into a single predicate - linq

(EDIT: I have asked the wrong question. The real problem I'm having is over at Compose LINQ-to-SQL predicates into a single predicate - but this one got some good answers so I've left it up!)
Given the following search text:
"keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 ... keywordN"
I want to end up with the following SQL:
SELECT [columns] FROM Customer
WHERE
(Customer.Forenames LIKE '%keyword1%' OR Customer.Surname LIKE '%keyword1%')
AND
(Customer.Forenames LIKE '%keyword2%' OR Customer.Surname LIKE '%keyword2%')
AND
(Customer.Forenames LIKE '%keyword3%' OR Customer.Surname LIKE '%keyword3%')
AND
...
AND
(Customer.Forenames LIKE '%keywordN%' OR Customer.Surname LIKE '%keywordN%')
Effectively, we're splitting the search text on spaces, trimming each token, constructing a multi-part OR clause based on each token, and then AND'ing the clauses together.
I'm doing this in Linq-to-SQL, and I have no idea how to dynamically compose a predicate based on an arbitrarily-long list of subpredicates. For a known number of clauses, it's easy to compose the predicates manually:
dataContext.Customers.Where(
(Customer.Forenames.Contains("keyword1") || Customer.Surname.Contains("keyword1")
&&
(Customer.Forenames.Contains("keyword2") || Customer.Surname.Contains("keyword2")
&&
(Customer.Forenames.Contains("keyword3") || Customer.Surname.Contains("keyword3")
);
but I want to handle an arbitrary list of search terms. I got as far as
Func<Customer, bool> predicate = /* predicate */;
foreach(var token in tokens) {
predicate = (customer
=> predicate(customer)
&&
(customer.Forenames.Contains(token) || customer.Surname.Contains(token));
}
That produces a StackOverflowException - presumably because the predicate() on the RHS of the assignment isn't actually evaluated until runtime, at which point it ends up calling itself... or something.
In short, I need a technique that, given two predicates, will return a single predicate composing the two source predicates with a supplied operator, but restricted to the operators explicitly supported by Linq-to-SQL. Any ideas?

I would suggest another technique
you can do:
var query = dataContext.Customers;
and then, inside a cycle do
foreach(string keyword in keywordlist)
{
query = query.Where(Customer.Forenames.Contains(keyword) || Customer.Surname.Contains(keyword));
}

If you want a more succinct and declarative way of writing this, you could also use Aggregate extension method instead of foreach loop and mutable variable:
var query = keywordlist.Aggregate(dataContext.Customers, (q, keyword) =>
q.Where(Customer.Forenames.Contains(keyword) ||
Customer.Surname.Contains(keyword));
This takes dataContext.Customers as the initial state and then updates this state (query) for every keyword in the list using the given aggregation function (which just calls Where as Gnomo suggests.

Related

Phrase matching with Sitecore ContentSearch API

I am using Sitecore 7.2 with a custom Lucene index and Linq. I need to give additional (maximum) weight to exact matches.
Example:
A user searches for "somewhere over the rainbow"
Results should include items which contain the word "rainbow", but items containing the exact and entire term "somewhere over the rainbow" should be given maximum weight. They will displayed to users as the top results. i.e. An item containing the entire phrase should weigh more heavily than an item which contains the word "rainbow" 100 times.
I may need to handle ranking logic outside of the ContentSearch API by collecting "phrase matches" separately from "wildcard matches", and that's fine.
Here's my existing code, truncated for brevity. The code works, but exact phrase matches are not treated as I described.
using (var context = ContentSearchManager.GetIndex("sitesearch-index").CreateSearchContext())
{
var pred = PredicateBuilder.False<SearchResultItem>();
pred = pred
.Or(i => i.Name.Contains(term)).Boost(1)
.Or(i => i["Field 1"].Contains(term)).Boost(3)
.Or(i => i["Field 2"].Contains(term)).Boost(1);
IQueryable<SearchResultItem> query = context.GetQueryable<SearchResultItem>().Where(pred);
var hits = query.GetResults().Hits;
...
}
How can I perform exact phrase matching and is it possible with the Sitecore.ContentSearch.Linq API?
Answering my own question. The problem was with the parenthesis syntax. It should be
.Or(i => i.Name.Contains(term).Boost(1))
rather than
.Or(i => i.Name.Contains(term)).Boost(1)
The boosts were not being observed.
I think if you do the following it will solve this:
Split your search string on space
Create a predicate for each split with an equal boost value,
Create an additional predicate with the complete search string and
with higher boost value
combine all these predicates in one "OR" predicate.
Also I recommend you to check the following:
Sitecore Solr Search Score Value
http://sitecoreinfo.blogspot.com/2015/10/sitecore-solr-search-result-items.html

Explain the below Linq Query?

results.Where(x=>x.Members.Any(y=>members.Contains(y.Name.ToLower())
I happened to see this query in internet. Can anyone explain this query please.
suggest me a good LINQ tutorial for this newbie.
thank you all.
Edited:
what is this x and y stands for?
x is a single result, of the type of the elements in the results sequence.
y is a single member, of the type of the elements in the x.Members sequence.
These are lambda expressions (x => x.whatever) that were introduced into the language with C# 3, where x is the input, and the right side (x.whatever) is the output (in this particular usage scenario).
An easier example
var list = new List<int> { 1, 2, 3 };
var oddNumbers = list.Where(i => i % 2 != 0);
Here, i is a single int item that is an input into the expression. i % 2 != 0 is a boolean expression evaluating whether the input is even or odd. The entire expression (i => i % 2 != 0) is a predicate, a Func<int, bool>, where the input is an integer and the output is a boolean. Follow? As you iterate over the query oddNumbers, each element in the list sequence is evaluated against the predicate. Those that pass then become part of your output.
foreach (var item in oddNumbers)
Console.WriteLine(item);
// writes 1, 3
Its a lambda expression. Here is a great LINQ tutorial
Interesting query, but I don't like it.
I'll answer your second question first. x and y are parameters to the lambda methods that are defined in the calls to Where() and Any(). You could easy change the names to be more meaningful:
results.Where(result =>
result.Members.Any(member => members.Contains(member.Name.ToLower());
And to answer your first question, this query will return each item in results where the Members collection has at least one item that is also contained in the Members collection as a lower case string.
The logic there doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me with knowing what the Members collection is or what it holds.
x will be every instance of the results collection. The query uses lambda syntax, so x=>x.somemember means "invoke somemember on each x passed in. Where is an extension method for IEnumerables that expects a function that will take an argument and return a boolean. Lambda syntax creates delegates under the covers, but is far more expressive for carrying out certain types of operation (and saves a lot of typing).
Without knowing the type of objects held in the results collection (results will be something that implements IEnumerable), it is hard to know exactly what the code above will do. But an educated guess is that it will check all the members of all the x's in the above collection, and return you an IEnumerable of only those that have members with all lower-case names.

Querying with multiple predicates on sub-objects in a collection with MongoDB (official c# driver)

I've the following data structure:
A
_id
B[]
_id
C[]
_id
UserId
I'm trying to run the following query:
where a.B._id == 'some-id' and a.B.C.UserId=='some-user-id'.
That means I need to find a B document that has a C document within with the relevant UserId, something like:
Query.And(Query.EQ("B._id", id), Query.EQ("B.C.UserId", userId));
This is not good, of course, as it may find B with that id and another different B that has C with that UserId. Not good.
How can I write it with the official driver?
If the problem is only that your two predicates on B are evaluated on different B instances ("it may find B with that ID and another different B that has C with that UserId"), then the solution is to use an operator that says "find me an item in the collection that satisfies both these predicates together".
Seems like the $elemMatch operator does exactly that.
From the docs:
Use $elemMatch to check if an element in an array matches the specified match expression. [...]
Note that a single array element must
match all the criteria specified; [...]
You only need to use this when more than 1 field must be matched in the array element.
Try this:
Query.ElemMatch("B", Query.And(
Query.EQ("_id", id),
Query.EQ("C.UserId", userId)
));
Here's a good explanation of $elemMatch and dot notation, which matches this scenario exactly.

Using Where() with a dynamic Func fails, but works with a hard coded Where() clause

See the two Linq (to SharePoint) code samples below.
The only differences are the highlighted sections of code. The first statement works as expected with a hard-coded where clause, but the 2nd set of code throws the error “Value does not fall in within the expected range” when I try to do a count on the items. What am I missing?
Works
relatedListItems = dc.GetList<GeneralPage>("Pages")
.Where(x => x.RelatedPracticesTitle.Any(y=>y=="Foo"))
if (relatedListItems.Count() == 0)
{…}
Fails - “Value does not fall within the expected range”
Func<GeneralPage, bool> f = x => x.RelatedPracticesTitle.Any(y => y == "Foo");
relatedListItems = dc.GetList<GeneralPage>("Pages")
.Where(f)
if (relatedListItems.Count() == 0)
{…}
If it's LINQ to Sharepoint, presumably that means it should be using expression trees, not delegates. Try:
Expression<Func<GeneralPage, bool>> f =
x => x.RelatedPracticesTitle.Any(y => y == "Foo");
relatedListItems = dc.GetList<GeneralPage>("Pages").Where(f);
By the way, it's generally a better idea to use Any() rather than Count() if you just want to find out if there are any results - that way it can return as soon as it's found the first one. (It also expresses what you're interested in more clearly, IMO.)
In the first case, you're using the Expression<Func<GeneralPage, bool>> overload and pass an expression which I assume LINQ to SharePoint will try to convert to CAML and execute.
In the second case, you're passing the plain Func<GeneralPage, bool> so LINQ to SharePoint can't figure out how to compose a query (it only sees the delegate, not the expression).

Filtering subsets using Linq

Imagine a have a very long enunumeration, too big to reasonably convert to a list. Imagine also that I want to remove duplicates from the list. Lastly imagine that I know that only a small subset of the initial enumeration could possibly contain duplicates. The last point makes the problem practical.
Basically I want to filter out the list based on some predicate and only call Distinct() on that subset, but also recombine with the enumeration where the predicate returned false.
Can anyone think of a good idiomatic Linq way of doing this? I suppose the question boils down to the following:
With Linq how can you perform selective processing on a predicated enumeration and recombine the result stream with the rejected cases from the predicate?
You can do it by traversing the list twice, once to apply the predicate and dedup, and a second time to apply the negation of the predicate. Another solution is to write your own variant of the Where extension method that pushes non-matching entries into a buffer on the side:
IEnumerable<T> WhereTee(this IEnumerable<T> input, Predicate<T> pred, List<T> buffer)
{
foreach (T t in input)
{
if (pred(t))
{
yield return t;
}
else
{
buffer.Add(t);
}
}
}
Can you give a little more details on how you would like to recombine the elments.
One way i can think of solving this problem is by using the Zip operator of .Net 4.0 like this.
var initialList = new List<int>();
var resjectedElemnts = initialList.Where( x=> !aPredicate(x) );
var accepetedElements = initialList.Where( x=> aPredicate(x) );
var result = accepetedElements.Zip(resjectedElemnts,(accepted,rejected) => T new {accepted,rejected});
This will create a list of pair of rejected and accepeted elements. But the size of the list will be contrained by the shorter list between the two inputs.

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