For the Nominal Accounts in ossAccounts I have chosen the latter which gives anyone taking on the system far more flexibility but with a little more complexity (mostly for me since they will have a simplified API to work with in the end).
This is fine for general processing but there are times when you wish to display all of the additional categories as though they are part of the NominalAccount, for example a list of accounts. After all this is how the user envisages the data.
In the past I have made extensive use of Visual Foxpro and could create pivots reasonable easily. However it appears that doing so in c# is a completely different kettle of fish even if the team behind VFP created linq. There appears to be very few solutions and they tend to be based on the properties of DataTables not the IEnumerables
My solution is a collection of ExpandoObjects that have had all the relevant properties added. It isn't going to win any efficiency awards but for relatively small datasets is ok.
Cut down versions of the Entity classes...
public class NominalAccount : BaseEntity
{
[Key]
public int NomincalAccountID { get; set; }
[...]
}
public class NominalCategory : BaseEntity
{
[Key]
public int NominalCategoryID { get; set; }
[Required]
[StringLength(30)]
public string Description { get; set; }
[...]
}
public class NominalCodeCategoryValue : BaseEntity
{
[Key]
public int NominalCodeCategoryValueID { get; set; }
[Required]
[StringLength(30)]
public string CategoryValue { get; set; }
[...]
}
internal Dictionary CreateExtendedNominalAccountObjects(List nominalCategories, List nominalAccounts, List nominalCategoryValues)
{
// Create object based on Categories
// index will be NominalAccountID
var extendedNominalAccounts = new Dictionary();
dynamic nominalObject = new ExpandoObject();
// Add all the categories to the ExpandoObject
foreach (var nominalCategory in nominalCategories)
{
((ExpandoObject)nominalObject).AddProperty(nominalCategory.Description, "");
}
// Create dataset for nominals
foreach (var nominalAccount in nominalAccounts)
{
var neo = ExpandoObjectExtensions.CloneExpando(nominalObject);
((ExpandoObject)neo).AddProperties(nominalAccount);
extendedNominalAccounts.Add(nominalAccount.NomincalAccountID, neo);
}
// Loop through the Nominal Category details and update the appropriate nominal ExpandoObject
foreach (var ncv in nominalCategoryValues)
{
var nomObj = extendedNominalAccounts[ncv.NominalAccountID];
var categoryDesc = (from nc in nominalCategories
where nc.NominalCategoryID == ncv.NominalCategoryID
select new { nc.Description }).Single();
nomObj.UpdateProperty(categoryDesc.Description, ncv.CategoryValue);
extendedNominalAccounts[ncv.NominalAccountID] = nomObj;
}
return extendedNominalAccounts;
}
public static class ExpandoObjectExtensions
{
public static void AddProperty(this ExpandoObject expando, string propertyName, object propertyValue)
{
// ExpandoObject supports IDictionary so we can extend it like this
var expandoDict = expando as IDictionary;
if (expandoDict.ContainsKey(propertyName))
expandoDict[propertyName] = propertyValue;
else
expandoDict.Add(propertyName, propertyValue);
}
public static void UpdateProperty(this ExpandoObject expando, string propertyName, object propertyValue)
{
// ExpandoObject supports IDictionary so we can extend it like this
var expandoDict = expando as IDictionary;
if (expandoDict.ContainsKey(propertyName))
expandoDict[propertyName] = propertyValue;
else
throw new SettingsPropertyNotFoundException("Property "+propertyName.Trim()+" missing.");
}
public static void AddProperties(this ExpandoObject expando, T obj)
{
var props = obj.GetType().GetProperties();
foreach (var propertyInfo in props)
{
expando.AddProperty(propertyInfo.Name,propertyInfo.GetValue(obj));
}
}
///
/// Creates a clone of an ExpandoObject
/// https://stackoverflow.com/q/22826610/82536
///
/// The object to clone
/// A clone of the given ExpandoObject.
public static ExpandoObject CloneExpando(this ExpandoObject expando)
{
var newExpando = new ExpandoObject();
foreach (var kvp in (IDictionary)expando)
{
((IDictionary)newExpando).Add(kvp);
}
return newExpando;
}
}
