Sorting an IList in C#

Question

So I came across an interesting problem today. We have a WCF web service that returns an IList. Not really a big deal until I wanted to sort it.

Turns out the IList

Answer 1

Found this thread while I was looking for a solution to the exact problem described in the original post. None of the answers met my situation entirely, however. Brody's answer was pretty close. Here is my situation and solution I found to it.

I have two ILists of the same type returned by NHibernate and have emerged the two IList into one, hence the need for sorting.

Like Brody said I implemented an ICompare on the object (ReportFormat) which is the type of my IList:

 public class FormatCcdeSorter:IComparer
    {
       public int Compare(ReportFormat x, ReportFormat y)
        {
           return x.FormatCode.CompareTo(y.FormatCode);
        }
    }

I then convert the merged IList to an array of the same type:

ReportFormat[] myReports = new ReportFormat[reports.Count]; //reports is the merged IList

Then sort the array:

Array.Sort(myReports, new FormatCodeSorter());//sorting using custom comparer

Since one-dimensional array implements the interface System.Collections.Generic.IList, the array can be used just like the original IList.