How to order child collections of entities in EF [duplicate]

Question

I have the following query:

public IEnumerable<Team> GetAllTeamsWithMembers(int ownerUserId)         {             return _ctx.Teams                  .Include(x => x.TeamMembers)                  .Where(x => x.UserId == ownerUserId)                  .OrderBy(x => x.Name).ToList();          } 

How do I go about ordering the teams by their name, and then have all the child members of each team sorted by their name?

It seems that do this I need to create a new DTO class and use a select. I'd like to use the EF entities already created, in this case Team has a navigation property to Members. I return IEnumerable<Team> out from my repository layer.

There doesn't seem to be a neat way of ordering child collections in EF. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

You could load the data and sort in memory after loading it.

IEnumerable<Team> teams = _ctx.Teams             .Include(x => x.TeamMembers)             .Include(x => x.TeamMembers.Select(u => u.User))             .Where(x => x.UserId == ownerUserId)             .OrderBy(x => x.Name).ToList();  foreach (var team in teams) {     team.TeamMembers = team.TeamMembers.OrderBy(m => m.Name);     foreach (var teamMember in team.TeamMembers)     {         teamMember.Users = teamMember.Users.OrderBy(u => u.Name);     } } 

Or you could use Projections and use the Change Tracking of EF to sort your collection. Here is an example of filtering an Include but the same works for Ordering.