Converting SQL to LINQ, Part 8: Left/Right Outer Join (Bill Horst)

VBTeam

This post assumes you’ve read the previous posts in this series.

         

After my post on joins, I’ve had some questions about outer joins.  As you can see in part 6, VB9 doesn’t have smooth support for Left or Right join.  I showed how to get similar functionality with Group Join, but I’ve looked into the subject some more, and want to give everyone a more extensive explanation of how to get left, right, and full outer join results accurately with VB LINQ.  Admittedly, these queries are very complex for a relatively simple concept, but unfortunately the VB team didn’t have the resources to implement these features in VB9.  If this support is important to you, you can submit a suggestion to the Visual Studio team to have it included for a future release on our feedback page.

 

I’ll cover Left and Right Outer Join in this post and hopefully put up an additional post for Full Outer Join next week.

 

Assumptions

 

For my code examples, I’ll be using a slightly modified version of the classes I defined in my first post.  In the below declarations, I’ve declared some nullable types on members which previously couldn’t have a value of Nothing (e.g. Integer -> Integer?).

 


Class Customer

    Public CustomerID As Integer?

    Public ContactName As String

    Public Phone As String

    Public Address As String

    Public City As String

    Public State As String

    Public Zip As String

End Class

 

Class Order

    Public OrderID As Integer?

    Public CustomerID As Integer?

    Public Cost As Single?

    Public Phone As String

    Public OrderDate As DateTime?

    Public ShippingZip As String

    Public ItemName As String

End Class

 

 

I’ve also declared CustomerTable and OrderTable variables as follows, to show some example results:

 

 

Dim CustomerTable As Customer() = { _

    New Customer With {.ContactName = “Bill Horst”, .CustomerID = 112}, _

    New Customer With {.ContactName = “John Doe”, .CustomerID = 354}, _

    New Customer With {.ContactName = “Jane Doe”, .CustomerID = 938}}

 

Dim OrderTable As Order() = { _

    New Order With {.OrderDate = #3/25/1982#, .CustomerID = 112}, _

    New Order With {.OrderDate = #3/13/2005#, .CustomerID = 112}, _

    New Order With {.OrderDate = #9/29/2007#, .CustomerID = 938}, _

    New Order With {.OrderDate = #1/31/2008#, .CustomerID = 444}}

 

 

Left Join

 

A SQL LEFT OUTER JOIN is like a standard Inner Join, but it returns results in the “Left Table” even if there is no matching result in the “Right Table”.  For example:

 

SQL

SELECT Contact.ContactName, Shipment.OrderDate

FROM CustomerTable Contact

LEFT OUTER JOIN OrderTable Shipment

   ON Contact.CustomerID = Shipment.CustomerID

 

 

Assuming the above data in CustomerTable and OrderTable, this query would give me results like the following:

 

Results:

ContactName     OrderDate

Bill Horst      3/25/1982

Bill Horst      3/13/2005

John Doe        NULL

Jane Doe        9/29/2007

 

If I want to re-create this query in VB code, I can start by setting up a Group Join between CustomerTable and OrderTable.  I don’t want to calculate any aggregate values, so I’ll use the Group keyword to provide an entry for each member of CustomerTable with a corresponding array of entries from OrderTable.

 

VB

From Contact In CustomerTable _

Group Join Shipment In OrderTable _

  On Contact.CustomerID Equals Shipment.CustomerID _

  Into RightTableResults = Group

 

Results:

{Contact={Customer}, RightTableResults = {Grouping}}

{Contact={Customer}, RightTableResults = {Order[]}}

{Contact={Customer}, RightTableResults = {Grouping}}

 

 

However, I don’t want a series of arrays, so I’ll add a From clause to cross-join each Contact with the individual members of the corresponding array.

 

VB

From Contact In CustomerTable _

Group Join Shipment In OrderTable _

  On Contact.CustomerID Equals Shipment.CustomerID _

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