How to filter items in a ListBox based on a searched string

Question

Hi all,

I have a Windows Forms application (C#) containing a ListBox into which I have added some items (I'm not using a DataSource). I want to filter the items in the ListBox to show only items containing a string I'm searching for.

I have done this by keeping a list of the original items and selecting matching items from that list each time the search string changes and updating the ListBox.Items

Is there a more elegant/efficient way to do this?

Answer 1

Is there a more elegant/efficient way?

No, not really.

You could connect through a BindingSource and that has Filter and Sort properties, but that doesn't work for a simple List<>. So you would have to use something like a DataTable and that would not be an improvement.

Your current method seems fine, especially if you can use LINQ to filter the list.

But I hope you're not looping over the Items property each time, just assign the filtered list to Listbox1.DataSource.

Answer 2

Here's a post that might be relevant to your question even though it is allready answered.

Filtering a listbox