Linq to Entities join vs groupjoin

Question

I have web searched but I still cant find a simple answer. Can someone please explain (in simple English) what a GroupJoin is? How is it different from a regula

Answer 1

Let's suppose you have two different classes:

public class Person
{
    public string Name, Email;
    
    public Person(string name, string email)
    {
        Name = name;
        Email = email;
    }
}

class Data
{
    public string Mail, SlackId;
    
    public Data(string mail, string slackId)
    {
        Mail = mail;
        SlackId = slackId;
    }
}

Now, let's Prepare data to work with:

var people = new Person[]
    {
        new Person("Sudi", "sudi@try.cd"),
        new Person("Simba", "simba@try.cd"),
        new Person("Sarah", string.Empty)
    };
    
    var records = new Data[]
    {
        new Data("sudi@try.cd", "Sudi_Try"),
        new Data("sudi@try.cd", "Sudi@Test"),
        new Data("simba@try.cd", "SimbaLion")
    };

You will note that sudi@try.cd has got two slackIds. I have made that for demonstrating how Join works.

Let's now construct the query to join Person with Data:

var query = people.Join(records,
        x => x.Email,
        y => y.Mail,
        (person, record) => new { Name = person.Name, SlackId = record.SlackId});
    Console.WriteLine(query);

After constructing the query, you could also iterate over it with a foreach like so:

foreach (var item in query)
    {
        Console.WriteLine($"{item.Name} has Slack ID {item.SlackId}");
    }

Let's also output the result for GroupJoin:

Console.WriteLine(
    
        people.GroupJoin(
            records,
            x => x.Email,
            y => y.Mail,
            (person, recs) => new {
                Name = person.Name,
                SlackIds = recs.Select(r => r.SlackId).ToArray() // You could materialize //whatever way you want.
            }
        ));

You will notice that the GroupJoin will put all SlackIds in a single group.