LINQ is returning class name and not value data

Question

Hi,

I have a collection of TwitterCollection objects held within a List. I am populating the TwitterCollection object (tc) via a foreach loop, and then accessing it through LINQ.

My class with its properties looks like this:

//simple field definition class
public class TwitterCollection
{
    public string origURL { get; set; }
    public string txtDesc { get; set; }
    public string imgURL { get; set; }
    public string userName { get; set; }
    public string createdAt { get; set; }
    public string realURL { get; set; }
    public string googleTitle { get; set; }
    public string googleDesc { get; set; }
}

I then go on to populate it with a loop through a bunch of RegEx matches in a group:

var list = new List<TwitterCollection>();

    foreach (Match match in matches)
    {

        GroupCollection groups = match.Groups;
        var tc = new TwitterCollection
        {
            origURL = groups[1].Value.ToString(),
            txtDesc = res.text,
            imgURL = res.profile_image_url,
            userName = res.from_user_id,
            createdAt = res.created_at,
        };
        list.Add(tc);
    }

Finally I am looking at the collection with LINQ and extracting only certain items for display:

    var counts = from URL in list
                 group URL by URL into g
                 orderby g.Count()
                 select new { myLink = g.Key, Count = g.Count() };

The outcome of all this is a long list of the word "TwitterCollection" in count.myLink and no count of URLs...

I used to have this all working before I shifted to a generic List. Now I have moved for convenience, it won't work.

I'd seriously appreciate someone taking me out of my misery here! Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Your list is of type List<TwitterCollection>, so the URL variable is of type TwitterCollection. So a TwitterCollection is what gets selected into g.Key (and hence myLink), and that gets rendered as the string "TwitterCollection".

Change your query to:

var counts = from tc in list
             group tc by tc.origURL into g  // note by tc.origURL to extract the origURL property
             ...

(It's not clear from your code which URL you want to group on, as a TwitterCollection contains several URLs. I've used origURL as an example.)