Normally I use stored procedures / work in SQL so apologies if I get the terminology slightly off here..
I have a database, with 3 seperate tables, and I need to search multiple fields in each of the 3 tables.
Im sure that I am not doing this the mose effective way, initially I am trying to do it in simple seteps to understand it.
I have the following;
var foo1 = entities.table1.Where(a => a.bodyText.Contains(searchString) || a.pageTitle.Contains(searchString));
var foo2 = entities.table2.Where(b => b.newsArticle.Contains(searchString) || b.newsArticle.Contains(searchString));
var foo3 = entities.table3.Where(c => c.ImageDescriptionContains(searchString));
I need to combine all these results into a single repeater for display.
At this point all 3 sets of data are in seperate, unique collections of anonymous data. So whats the best way of converting these into a single coherent bindable source?
I was thinking of itereating through each list in turn, pulling out the fields I need to display and putting them in a new class, then binding a lsit of these classes to the repeater.
But it all seems a bit clunky to me.
Is there a way of doing the search across all 3 tables in one go, and returning just the fields I need from each table, with a common name (i.e. in SQL I could write
select b.newsArticle as myText,
or
select newsArticle, ''
to return the news article and an empty string).