sequential autogenerated Id with help of linq

Question

I have a class Booking

public class Booking
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }

        public string From { get; set; }

        public string To { get; set; }
    }

I create a List bookings with the help of linq and I want some mechanism with which I want to autogenerate the 'Id' property to increment by 1.

I.e. if the List bookings contains 10 Booking object then the first object's Id = 1, second Id = 2 and so one...

any suggestion

Answer 1

The following will give you a list of NEW bookings with the index projected into your ID property. You could probably do something similar to this to update the existing list with the index...

var myBookings = myExistingListOfTen.Select((b, index) => new Booking
                 {
                     Id = index + 1, 
                     From=b.From, 
                     To=b.To
                 });

Answer 2

Not nice, but it will work. The trick is to use the overload providing the index of the item.

list = list.Select((item, index) => { item.Id = index; return item; });

This will update the existing bookings, but you could also select a new instance with the id set and avoid this ugly return at the cost of duplicating the bookings and losing the references as Scott Ivey suggests. And of course you have to add one if you want one-based ids.

I find it a bit strange to generate ids this way, too, but it might be a acceptable solution if you get a list of new bookings without id and want to generate them. In this case the ids should obviously not start with zero or one, but the largest already assigned id plus one.

Answer 3

Surely if it is a property on the object you want the value to be consistent from invocation to invocation. Booking 'A' shouldn't have a different id depending on where it exists in the list. If you are simply wanting the index of the item in the list, don't store it as a property of the item, but derive it from its position in the list.

Answer 4

public class Booking
{
    private static int BookingCount = 1;

    public Booking()
    {
       Id = BookingCount++;
    }

    public int Id { get; set; }

    public string From { get; set; }

    public string To { get; set; }
}

Answer 5

Not sure if I understand your question right, but you could always

ID = bookings.Select(b=>b.ID).Max()+1;

Not sure if that's such a good idea (it won't be uber performant).

Answer 6

Although I agree with @tvanfosson (+1), if you really want to keep an ID in Booking I think that this should be setted upon the construction of Booking. You could have something like a Booking Context where each context would create bookings with serial IDs:

    public class Booking
    {
        protected Booking() { }
        public int Id { get; set; }

        public string From { get; set; }

        public string To { get; set; }
    }

    public class BookingContextFactory
    {
        private int count;

        public BookingContextFactory() : this(0) { }
        public BookingContextFactory(int startValue) 
        {
            count = startValue;
        }

        public Booking CreateBooking(string from, string to)
        {
            return new InternalBooking { Id = count++, From = from, To = to };
        }

        private class InternalBooking : Booking
        {
            public InternalBooking() : base() { }
        }
    }