In C#, what is the best way to sort a list of objects by a string property and get correct order?

Question

I have a list of "Issue" objects and i want to sort them by the "Priority" field.

The issue is that "Priority" is a string name like "HIGH", "MEDIUM" so i don't have an Id that i can sort by. How do I sort and tell the sorter that "HIGH" is higher than "MEDIUM" which is higher than "LOW" ?

Answer 1

The obvious way would be:

string[] priorities = {  "LOW", "MEDIUM", "HIGH" };

var orderedIssues = issues.OrderByDescending
              (issue => Array.IndexOf(priorities, issue.Priority));

But consider using an enumeration:

public enum Priority
{
    Low,
    Medium,
    High
}

var orderedIssues = issues.OrderByDescending
              (issue => (Priority)Enum.Parse(typeof(Priority), issue.Priority, true));

Even better would be using the enumeration type as the type of the property / field itself, in which case it's as simple (and less prone to error) as:

var orderedIssues = issues.OrderByDescending(issue => issue.Priority);