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Linq-to-Entities Join vs GroupJoin

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What is Groupjoin in LINQ?

The group join is useful for producing hierarchical data structures. It pairs each element from the first collection with a set of correlated elements from the second collection. For example, a class or a relational database table named Student might contain two fields: Id and Name .

Is LINQ join inner or outer?

One commonly used feature of Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) is the facility to combine two sequences of related data using joins. The standard join operation provides an inner join but with a minor modification can be changed to give a left outer join.

Can we do Joins in LINQ?

In a LINQ query expression, join operations are performed on object collections. Object collections cannot be "joined" in exactly the same way as two relational tables. In LINQ, explicit join clauses are only required when two source sequences are not tied by any relationship.

What type of join is LINQ join?

A LINQ JOIN keyword is used to combine rows from two or more tables, based on a common field between them. Like SQL Joins, the Linq is also provided some keywords to achieve Inner Join and Outer Join. As we know from SQL outer join is divided into 2 groups that is Left Outer Join and Right Outer Join.


Behaviour

Suppose you have two lists:

Id  Value
1   A
2   B
3   C

Id  ChildValue
1   a1
1   a2
1   a3
2   b1
2   b2

When you Join the two lists on the Id field the result will be:

Value ChildValue
A     a1
A     a2
A     a3
B     b1
B     b2

When you GroupJoin the two lists on the Id field the result will be:

Value  ChildValues
A      [a1, a2, a3]
B      [b1, b2]
C      []

So Join produces a flat (tabular) result of parent and child values.
GroupJoin produces a list of entries in the first list, each with a group of joined entries in the second list.

That's why Join is the equivalent of INNER JOIN in SQL: there are no entries for C. While GroupJoin is the equivalent of OUTER JOIN: C is in the result set, but with an empty list of related entries (in an SQL result set there would be a row C - null).

Syntax

So let the two lists be IEnumerable<Parent> and IEnumerable<Child> respectively. (In case of Linq to Entities: IQueryable<T>).

Join syntax would be

from p in Parent
join c in Child on p.Id equals c.Id
select new { p.Value, c.ChildValue }

returning an IEnumerable<X> where X is an anonymous type with two properties, Value and ChildValue. This query syntax uses the Join method under the hood.

GroupJoin syntax would be

from p in Parent
join c in Child on p.Id equals c.Id into g
select new { Parent = p, Children = g }

returning an IEnumerable<Y> where Y is an anonymous type consisting of one property of type Parent and a property of type IEnumerable<Child>. This query syntax uses the GroupJoin method under the hood.

We could just do select g in the latter query, which would select an IEnumerable<IEnumerable<Child>>, say a list of lists. In many cases the select with the parent included is more useful.

Some use cases

1. Producing a flat outer join.

As said, the statement ...

from p in Parent
join c in Child on p.Id equals c.Id into g
select new { Parent = p, Children = g }

... produces a list of parents with child groups. This can be turned into a flat list of parent-child pairs by two small additions:

from p in parents
join c in children on p.Id equals c.Id into g // <= into
from c in g.DefaultIfEmpty()               // <= flattens the groups
select new { Parent = p.Value, Child = c?.ChildValue }

The result is similar to

Value Child
A     a1
A     a2
A     a3
B     b1
B     b2
C     (null)

Note that the range variable c is reused in the above statement. Doing this, any join statement can simply be converted to an outer join by adding the equivalent of into g from c in g.DefaultIfEmpty() to an existing join statement.

This is where query (or comprehensive) syntax shines. Method (or fluent) syntax shows what really happens, but it's hard to write:

parents.GroupJoin(children, p => p.Id, c => c.Id, (p, c) => new { p, c })
       .SelectMany(x => x.c.DefaultIfEmpty(), (x,c) => new { x.p.Value, c?.ChildValue } )

So a flat outer join in LINQ is a GroupJoin, flattened by SelectMany.

2. Preserving order

Suppose the list of parents is a bit longer. Some UI produces a list of selected parents as Id values in a fixed order. Let's use:

var ids = new[] { 3,7,2,4 };

Now the selected parents must be filtered from the parents list in this exact order.

If we do ...

var result = parents.Where(p => ids.Contains(p.Id));

... the order of parents will determine the result. If the parents are ordered by Id, the result will be parents 2, 3, 4, 7. Not good. However, we can also use join to filter the list. And by using ids as first list, the order will be preserved:

from id in ids
join p in parents on id equals p.Id
select p

The result is parents 3, 7, 2, 4.


According to eduLINQ:

The best way to get to grips with what GroupJoin does is to think of Join. There, the overall idea was that we looked through the "outer" input sequence, found all the matching items from the "inner" sequence (based on a key projection on each sequence) and then yielded pairs of matching elements. GroupJoin is similar, except that instead of yielding pairs of elements, it yields a single result for each "outer" item based on that item and the sequence of matching "inner" items.

The only difference is in return statement:

Join:

var lookup = inner.ToLookup(innerKeySelector, comparer); 
foreach (var outerElement in outer) 
{ 
    var key = outerKeySelector(outerElement); 
    foreach (var innerElement in lookup[key]) 
    { 
        yield return resultSelector(outerElement, innerElement); 
    } 
} 

GroupJoin:

var lookup = inner.ToLookup(innerKeySelector, comparer); 
foreach (var outerElement in outer) 
{ 
    var key = outerKeySelector(outerElement); 
    yield return resultSelector(outerElement, lookup[key]); 
} 

Read more here:

  • Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 19 - Join

  • Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 22 - GroupJoin


Let's suppose you have two different classes:

public class Person
{
    public string Name, Email;
    
    public Person(string name, string email)
    {
        Name = name;
        Email = email;
    }
}
class Data
{
    public string Mail, SlackId;
    
    public Data(string mail, string slackId)
    {
        Mail = mail;
        SlackId = slackId;
    }
}

Now, let's Prepare data to work with:

var people = new Person[]
    {
        new Person("Sudi", "[email protected]"),
        new Person("Simba", "[email protected]"),
        new Person("Sarah", string.Empty)
    };
    
    var records = new Data[]
    {
        new Data("[email protected]", "Sudi_Try"),
        new Data("[email protected]", "Sudi@Test"),
        new Data("[email protected]", "SimbaLion")
    };

You will note that [email protected] has got two slackIds. I have made that for demonstrating how Join works.

Let's now construct the query to join Person with Data:

var query = people.Join(records,
        x => x.Email,
        y => y.Mail,
        (person, record) => new { Name = person.Name, SlackId = record.SlackId});
    Console.WriteLine(query);

After constructing the query, you could also iterate over it with a foreach like so:

foreach (var item in query)
    {
        Console.WriteLine($"{item.Name} has Slack ID {item.SlackId}");
    }

Let's also output the result for GroupJoin:

Console.WriteLine(
    
        people.GroupJoin(
            records,
            x => x.Email,
            y => y.Mail,
            (person, recs) => new {
                Name = person.Name,
                SlackIds = recs.Select(r => r.SlackId).ToArray() // You could materialize //whatever way you want.
            }
        ));

You will notice that the GroupJoin will put all SlackIds in a single group.