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How do you perform a CROSS JOIN with LINQ to SQL?

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4 Answers

up vote 75 down vote accepted

A cross-join is simply the Cartesian product of two sets. There's no explicit join operator for it.

var combo = from p in people
            from c in cars
            select new
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Based on Steve's answer, the simplest expression would be this:

var combo = from Person in people
            from Car    in cars
            select new {Person, Car};
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The same thing with linq extension methods:

var names = new string[] { "Ana", "Raz", "John" };
var numbers = new int[] { 1, 2, 3 };
var newList=names.SelectMany(
    x => numbers,
    (y, z) => { return y + z + " test "; });
foreach (var item in newList)
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A Tuple is a good type for Cartesian product:

public static IEnumerable<Tuple<T1, T2>> CrossJoin<T1, T2>(IEnumerable<T1> sequence1, IEnumerable<T2> sequence2)
    return sequence1.SelectMany(t1 => sequence2.Select(t2 => Tuple.Create(t1, t2)));
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