Khalid Abuhakmeh had a post a while back about conditional LINQ clauses. I thought I might take the very cool extensions he created and show how we can use them in a real-world situation, namely, building a complex search engine. There will be ASP.NET Core Razor Pages, and also board games. Prepare yourselves!

The Sample Project

What Are Conditional LINQ Clauses?

If you’ve seen my Modeling Practice series, you know I’m a fan of board games. For this project, let’s pretend that we’re going to code up a LINQ-based search engine for various types of board games.

If you’ve ever looked at the site BoardGameGeek, you know that there are a LOT of different types of board games. Some games only allow four players, some allow many more, some are cooperative or competitive, some are easy to learn and play and some come with giant rulebooks that are not for the faint of heart.

Our LINQ-based search engine will need to be able to search on many different properties of board games. However, we want to allow the engine to only search on properties the user selects. For example, the user might want to search by recommended age and game type (e.g. strategy or party games), or by maximum number of players, or by cooperative vs competitive, or by any combination thereof!

As I mentioned at the top, I originally saw the conditional LINQ clauses on Khalid Abuhakmeh’s blog; I ported his code over to my sample project. The extension methods he published look like this:

These extension methods are meant to conditionally apply LINQ clauses if a boolean is set to true. For example, you might use them like this:

The query will then be modified so that if searchByOtherProperty is true, the query will return items where OtherProperty equals a certain value.

We are going to use these conditional LINQ clauses to build our board game search engine. But first, we need to do a little setup.

The Setup

Let’s start our modeling with a class and a couple of enumerations, like this:

We can also instantiate a whole list of board games to act as our data store:

Now we need to build the page to allow the user to search our board game data store.

The Front-End

We have five properties of board games that our users can search by:

We not only need the values of these properties that are being searched for, but also properties that say whether or not the former properties are even being used in the search. All of this results in a rather large page model

We also need the corresponding HTML on the page itself (example is shortened for brevity):

Finally, we are using some simple jQuery to ensure that search fields are only shown when they are needed:

But all of this is just to get to the real meat of this post: How do we use conditional LINQ clauses to implement the actual search method?

Implementing the Search

Since we have properties that represent whether or not a particular search field is included, and the search field’s value, we can chain together the conditional LINQ query extensions we defined earlier in the Razor Page’s model, like this:

You could just as well implement this using a bunch of if() statements, but this is much cleaner and, in my opinion, easier to read.

GIF Time!

To demonstrate how this works in the browser, here’s a GIF:

Using conditional LINQ clauses, we can generate a complex search feature that allows our users to choose what they want to search by. Said feature is done by having properties in our page model that specify whether or not a specific search field is being used, and by chaining conditional LINQ to implement the actual search.

Don’t forget to check out the sample project over on GitHub!

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Happy Coding!