How to use the results of a database query using Linq to fill a DataGrid? It should be no big deal since there is a useful CopyToDataTable extension method:

   1:  public static DataTable CopyToDataTable<T>(

   2:      this IEnumerable<T> source

   3:  )

   4:  where T : DataRow

 However, there is a problem: T has to be a DataRow. When returning query results from the database, especially with EF, your query results are not DataRows (and I wonder if the same is true for Linq to Sql too). So, in this case, you'll have to fill the DataTable by hand. Thanks to this good blog post, I was able to fill it:

   1:  DataTable dataTable = new DataTable();

   2:  dataTable.TableName = "ResultsTable";

   3:  dataTable.Columns.Add("User", typeof(string));

   4:  dataTable.Columns.Add("TotalJobs", typeof(int));

   5:   

   6:  var query = /* your linq query comes here. no restrictions! */

we have the DataTable and the query set up. Now, the tricky part!

   1:  var results = query.Select(anonym => new Func<DataRow, int, int, DataRow>(

   2:      (DataRow row, int index, int count) =>

   3:      {

   4:          row["User"] = index;

   5:          row["TotalJobs"] = count;

   6:          return row;

   7:      })

   8:      .Invoke(dataTable.NewRow(), anonym.Index, anonym.TotalJobs));

   9:   

  10:  results.ToList().ForEach(row => dataTable.Rows.Add(row));

Absolutely a good piece of unreadable code :)

query variable are your Linq query results, which may be an IEnumerable of some of your data entities or even a anonymous type. It doesn't matter! For each element of this enumeration, we're creating a DataRow and assigning some values to its columns. Then, we call Invoke to indeed invoke our anonymous delegate Func, passing in our anonymous type properties, that are used later to fill the DataTable.

You'll probably gonna need to read it a couple times to digest it a bit and still it will look "WTF did I really wrote this code?!?" after a couple days :)