Reorder objects based on provided enumerable order

Question

This code feels like it goes through too many conversions to accomplish my goal:

based on an IEnumerable of ids get those objects from a data store and set their DisplayOrder property to the position of the associated id.

Is there a more elegant solution that I'm missing?

public void ReorderElements(IEnumerable<int> elementSks)
{
 var elementsToReorder = GetSession().QueryOver<DocumentElement>()
 .WhereRestrictionOn(de => de.DocumentElementSk).IsIn(elementSks.ToArray()).List();
 var elementOrder = elementSks.Select((sk, i) => new { Sk = sk, Order = i })
 .ToDictionary(p => p.Sk, p => p.Order);
 elementsToReorder.ToList()
 .ForEach(e => e.DisplayOrder = elementOrder[e.DocumentElementSk]);
 this.Save(elementsToReorder);
}

• sgriffinusa: Are the elementSks in any particular order when the enter the method?
• ahsteele: @sgriffinusa The ids are posted in order from a web page and then sent to this repository method.
• sgriffinusa: Sorry, I should have been more specific, what I want to know is if they are sorted.
• ahsteele: @sgriffinusa yes the ids are in the order I want them in. The elements retrieved from the data store are ordered by their primary key. So I have to update them based on the position of the ids in elementSks.

Answer 1

If the list on input is going to be short, or if performance doesn't matter to you, you can simplify the code by using IndexOf() instead of the dictionary:

public void ReorderElements(IEnumerable<int> elementSks)
{
 var elementsToReorder = GetSession().QueryOver<DocumentElement>()
 .WhereRestrictionOn(de => de.DocumentElementSk).IsIn(elementSks.ToArray()).List();
 var elementOrder = elementSks.ToList();
 foreach(var element in elementsToReorder)
 element.DisplayOrder = elementOrder.IndexOf(element.DocumentElementSk);
 this.Save(elementsToReorder);
}

Answer 2

Please try this. I wrote this without testing or even compiling.

public void ReorderElements(IEnumerable<int> elementSks)
{
 var skToElementsToReorder = GetSession().QueryOver<DocumentElement>()
 .WhereRestrictionOn(de => de.DocumentElementSk).IsIn(elementSks.ToArray())
 .ToDictionary(el => el.DocumentElementSk, el => el);
 int index = 0;
 foreach(int sk in elementSks)
 {
 // Assumes that the key exists - the .IsIn restriction right before helps
 skToElementsToReorder[sk].DisplayOrder = index++;
 }
 this.Save(elementsToReorder);
}

Somehow I think that this can help: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/101-LINQ-Samples-3fb9811b (as long as you can zip elementSks together with an index. Let me try a simpler version:

public class /* or struct ? */Element 
{
 public string name;
 public in sk;
 public int index;
}
// I am not fluent in LINQ, but Linq.Zip might help to generate these?
public class SkTuple
{
 int sk;
 int index;
}
// Now you have an `IEnumerable` of each somehow, and you want to do an update at the same time as you do a join ... like this? 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/709560/linq-in-line-property-update-during-join

This kind of got me thinking that maybe SQL is king after all - perhaps you want to just save this list of ids into a temp table where table id will be the index, and then call a stored procedure which will use a join and an update like here.

• ahsteele: The linq to retrieve elementsToReorder is NHibernate's new QueryOver syntax. It's just a rehashing of their ICriteria expression syntax. It boils down to SQL and doesn't have that much affect on performance. Everything after the object retrieval is what I'm most worried about.