Cannot convert from an IEnumerable<T> to an ICollection<T>

Question

I have defined the following:

public ICollection<Item> Items { get; set; } 

When I run this code:

Items = _item.Get("001"); 

I get the following message:

Error   3    Cannot implicitly convert type  'System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<Storage.Models.Item>' to  'System.Collections.Generic.ICollection<Storage.Models.Item>'.  An explicit conversion exists (are you missing a cast?) 

Can someone explain what I am doing wrong. I am very confused about the difference between Enumerable, Collections and using the ToList()

Added information

Later in my code I have the following:

for (var index = 0; index < Items.Count(); index++)  

Would I be okay to define Items as an IEnumerable?

Answer 1

ICollection<T> inherits from IEnumerable<T> so to assign the result of

IEnumerable<T> Get(string pk) 

to an ICollection<T> there are two ways.

// 1. You know that the referenced object implements `ICollection<T>`, //    so you can use a cast ICollection<T> c = (ICollection<T>)Get("pk");  // 2. The returned object can be any `IEnumerable<T>`, so you need to  //    enumerate it and put it into something implementing `ICollection<T>`.  //    The easiest is to use `ToList()`: ICollection<T> c = Get("pk").ToList(); 

The second options is more flexible, but has a much larger performance impact. Another option is to store the result as an IEnumerable<T> unless you need the extra functionality added by the ICollection<T> interface.

Additional Performance Comment

The loop you have

for (var index = 0; index < Items.Count(); index++) 

works on an IEnumerable<T> but it is inefficient; each call to Count() requires a complete enumeration of all elements. Either use a collection and the Count property (without the parenthesis) or convert it into a foreach loop:

foreach(var item in Items)