Projection

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Projection is the abstraction of taking one shape of data and creating a different shape of it.  For instance, you could take a collection of one type, filter it and/or sort it, and then project a collection of a new type.

The Select extension method is what you use to implement projection on a collection.  You can pass a lambda expression to the Select extension method that takes one object from the source collection, and projects one object into the new projection.

Let's say that we have a collection of integers, and we want a new collection of strings of x's, where the string lengths are determined by the source collection of integers.  The following code shows how to do this:

int[] lengths =
    new[] { 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1 };
IEnumerable<string> strings =
    lengths.Select(i => "".PadRight(i, 'x'));
foreach (var s in strings)
    Console.WriteLine(s);
 

This code produces the following output:

x
xxx
xxxxx
xxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxx
xxxxx
xxx
x
 

Or we could take an array of doubles, and project a collection of integers, casting each double to int:

double[] dbls =
    new[] { 1.5, 3.2, 5.2, 7.3, 9.7, 7.5, 5.0, 3.2, 1.9 };
IEnumerable<int> ints =
    dbls.Select(d => (int)d);
foreach (var i in ints)
    Console.WriteLine(i);
 

Or we can take a collection of elements from an XML tree, and project a collection of strings.  The strings projection contains the value of each element:

XElement xmlDoc = XElement.Parse(
    @"<Root>
        <Child>abc</Child>
        <Child>def</Child>
        <Child>ghi</Child>
      </Root>");
IEnumerable<string> values =
    xmlDoc.Elements().Select(e => (string)e);
foreach (string s in values)
    Console.WriteLine(s);
 

But in the real world, our projections will typically be much more involved than this.  For instance, we will often take a collection of some class, and project a collection of a different class.  Or we may project a collection of anonymous types (introduced in the next topic).

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