Sorting a composite collection

.net, c#, collections, data-binding, wpf

Solution

Update: I found a much more elegant solution:

class MyCompositeObject
{
    DateTime    CreatedDate;
    string      SomeAttribute;
    Object      Obj1;
{
class MyCompositeObjects : List<MyCompositeObject> { }

I found that due to reflection, the specific type stored in Obj1 is resolved at runtime and the type specific DataTemplate is applied as expected!

Problem

So WPF doesn't support standard sorting or filtering behavior for views of CompositeCollections, so what would be a best practice for solving this problem. There are two or more object collections of different types. You want to combine them into a single sortable and filterable collection (withing having to manually implement sort or filter). One of the approaches I've considered is to create a new object collection with only a few core properties, including the ones that I would want the collection sorted on, and an object instance of each type. ``` class MyCompositeObject { enum ObjectType; DateTime CreatedDate; string SomeAttribute; myObjectType1 Obj1; myObjectType2 Obj2; { class MyCompositeObjects : List<MyCompositeObject> { } ``` And then loop through my two object collections to build the new composite collection. Obviously this is a bit of a brute force method, but it would work. I'd get all the default view sorting and filtering behavior on my new composite object collection, and I'd be able to put a data template on it to display my list items properly depending on which type is actually stored in that composite item. What suggestions are there for doing this in a more elegant way?

Original source