How to search a String in Class in c#

Question

I am developing an app in which i have some data fetched from net into a class. Class is

public class Detail
{
        public string name { get; set; }
        public List<Education> education { get; set; }
        public City city { get; set; }
        public List<Work> work { get; set; }
}

public class Education
{
        public string DegreeName { get; set; }
}

public class City 
    {
        public string name { get; set; }
    }
public class Work
    {
        public string name { get; set; }
    }

Data is stored for a person in the above class.

Now i want to search for a string say q=" Which Manager Graduated From USA ?"

So i want it to search for the above query...

Based on how much words matched, i want to give the Name of user. So searching for person if he is a Manager Graduated From USA ? (may be less words, for search like some Director from India)

The approach i am trying to look for words like Manager in Work and Graduate in Education and Location for USA

I am making an array of search string

string[] qList = q.Split(' ');

and then traverse through the class. But i don't have any idea of how to (efficiently) look for data in the class.

And is my approach good enough for search or is there any better option ?

Answer 1

What you're developing is a human readable and writable query language. Starting with a string split may be a, well, start but imagine the search possibilities: Search for people in a city or a range of cities, search for people that worked for a top 500 company or in a certain field.

For this purpose you should develop a query language. With an easy to change and documented grammar. Take a look at ANTLR a Parser Generator that plays nice with C#/.NET.

Answer 2

I have somehow concern about the mechanism you are trying to implement, if user types q=" Manager Graduated From USA ?", mean doesn't put the word 'which' in it, so you will have to go for query language like ANTLR as suggested.

My recommendation is to give dropdowns to user, first must contain values of Work Property, 2nd must contain values of education and than a text box to enter the City.

After you pass these values to your method, use LINQ to get the data from your collection like:

var filteredResults = from result in YOURDETAILCOLLECTION
                      where result.city.Contains(YOURCITYTEXTBOXVALUE)
                      select result;

You can search for the mechanism, how to where in LINQ on a List.

Answer 3

If at all possible, try indexing your data using Lucene .NET or a similar search technology, like Solr or ElasticSearch. These technologies are optimized for search and provide you with lots of options to improve the ranking of your results. It can easily answer the question in your opening post and it's very fast. It would be very hard to implement this functionality on your own.