Dynamic LINQ OR Conditions

Question

I'm looking to use LINQ to do multiple where conditions on a collection similar to

IEnumerable<Object> items;
items.Where(p => p.FirstName = "John");
items.Where(p => p.LastName = "Smith");

except for rather than having multiple AND conditions (as with this example), I'd like to have multiple OR conditions.

EDIT Sorry, to clarify I don't know how many of these conditions I will have so

items.Where(p => p.FirstName = "John" || p => p.LastName = "Smith")

won't work.

Basically, here's what I'm trying to do:

foreach(var name in names)
{
    items = items.Where(p => p.Name == name);
}

Answer 1

Use PredicateBuilder:

Suppose you want to write a LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework query that implements a keyword-style search. In other words, a query that returns rows whose description contains some or all of a given set of keywords...

The ideal approach is to dynamically construct a lambda expression tree that performs an or-based predicate.

Of all the things that will drive you to manually constructing expression trees, the need for dynamic predicates is the most common in a typical business application. Fortunately, it’s possible to write a set of simple and reusable extension methods that radically simplify this task. This is the role of our PredicateBuilder class...