Removing duplicates from a PageDataCollection

Posted on November 27, 2009 by Frederik Vig in C#, EPiServer

Today I had to remove duplicate pages from a PageDataCollection. I checked for a method that would help me with this in the SDK, but couldn’t find one. I then went to the Filters namespace to see if there was a filter for this, but no luck.

I then remembered that System.Linq has a great extension method for collections that implement IEnumerable, called Distinct, that does exactly what I want.

The code is pretty simple.

// using System.Linq;
myPageDataCollection.Distinct();

Simple and elegant, but of course it didn’t work!

Custom comparer

If you take a look at the documentation for the Distinct method you’ll see an overload method that takes IEqualityComparer(T) for comparing.

Below is a custom comparer for PageData, that implements the IEqualityComparer interface. Pretty simple code.

public class PageDataComparer : IEqualityComparer<PageData>
{
	public bool Equals(PageData a, PageData b)
	{
		return a.PageLink.CompareToIgnoreWorkID(b.PageLink);
	}
 
	public int GetHashCode(PageData pageData)
	{
		return pageData.PageLink.GetHashCode();
	}
}

The updated call to the Distinct method now looks like this.

myPageDataCollection.Distinct(new PageDataComparer());

Custom filter

We can do the same with a custom filter.

public class FilterRemoveDuplicates : IPageFilter
{
	public void Filter(PageDataCollection pages)
	{
		var pageReferences = new List<PageReference>();
 
		for (int pageIndex = pages.Count - 1; pageIndex >= 0; pageIndex--)
		{
			PageData pageData = pages[pageIndex];
			if (pageReferences.Contains(pageData.PageLink))
			{
				pages.RemoveAt(pageIndex);
			}
			else
			{
				pageReferences.Add(pageData.PageLink);
			}
		}  
	}
 
	public void Filter(object sender, FilterEventArgs e)
	{
		this.Filter(e.Pages);
	}
 
	public bool ShouldFilter(PageData page)
	{
		throw new NotImplementedException();
	}
}
 
new Filters.FilterRemoveDuplicates().Filter(myPageDataCollection);

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