Introduction

Have you ever tried to provide your users with a way to dynamically build their own query to filter a list? If you ever tried, maybe you found it a little complicated. If you never tried, it could be tedious to do. But, with the help of LINQ, it does not need to be that hard (indeed, it could be even enjoyable).

Description

Predicate Builder is a powerful LINQ expression that is mainly used when too many search filter parameters are used for querying data by writing dynamic query expression. We can write a query like Dynamic SQL.

Background

Scenario

Filter record for the employees having salary > 10000
A typical Linq Predicate used will be
x=> x.salary > 10000

But suppose you want to provide your users a way to choose on which field and with what value they want to filter records like below:

One way is to write predicate for each individual filter and checking each time user hits.

If (filter == "Name")
  result = employees.Where(x=> x.Name ==  {value});
Else If (filter == "Dev")
  result = employees.Where(x=> x.Dev == {value});
Else If (filter == "Age")
  result = employees.Where(x=> x.Age ==  {value});
Else If (filter == "Salary")
  result = employees.Where(x=> x.Salary ==  {value});

Another way is building dynamic predicate based on the user’s selection with less code. Here field name and filter value both will be provided by Use , for each individual criteria no need to write separate code.

var andCriteria = new List();
Expression<Func<Employee, bool>> predicate;
string Fieldname = string.Empty, FieldValue = string.Empty;
var type = t.GetProperty(Fieldname);
                   andCriteria.Add(c => Cast(type.GetValue(c),   type.PropertyType) == Cast(FieldValue, type.PropertyType));
                   
predicate = c => andCriteria.All(pred => pred(c));
result = employees.AsQueryable().Where(predicate).ToList();

You can use the same logic when you want to apply filters on multiple fields and want to sort data.

Demo: Refer Link