Naturally sort IQueryable strings in WCF

Question

I have a good way to sort data "naturally" with an IComparer similar to the answers @ Natural Sort Order in C#. In my case, I have a class that goes something like this:

public class Widget
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

If I have a collection that reads as follows,

[{Id: 1, Name: "2 N. Street"},{Id: 2, Name: "33 N. Street"},{Id: 3, Name: "4 N. Street"}]

using an OData query like the following would return the data in the same order as above,

http://www.example.com/Widget.svc/GetWidgets?$orderby=Name

while I actually would like the data "naturally" ordered as such:

[{Id: 1, Name: "2 N. Street"},{Id: 3, Name: "4 N. Street"},{Id: 2, Name: "33 N. Street"}]

Is there a good way to customize a WCF service to make any query that tries to order by any string property to sort data "naturally"?

The best way to generally handle this that I've found is to provide an implementation of `IQueryable` that naturally sorts string columns. I'll provide an answer that spells this out in more detail if I can get to it. — Peter Majeed, Apr 29 '17 at 02:00

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 16 '17 at 23:54

This is now possible via a pre-release NuGet package called Buildium.ComparedQueryable.

Install-Package Buildium.ComparedQueryable -Version 0.1.3

Given you have an IQueryable stored in memory, calling AsNaturalQueryable on it would return the collection sorted naturally.

using ComparedQueryable;

public IHttpActionResult Get()
{
    IEnumerable<Widget> widgets = this.service.GetWidgets();
    return widgets.AsNaturalQueryable();
}

Naturally sort IQueryable strings in WCF

1 Answers1