Merge two (or more) lists into one, in C# .NET

Question

Is it possible to convert two or more lists into one single list, in .NET using C#?

For example,

public static List<Product> GetAllProducts(int categoryId){ .... }
.
.
.
var productCollection1 = GetAllProducts(CategoryId1);
var productCollection2 = GetAllProducts(CategoryId2);
var productCollection3 = GetAllProducts(CategoryId3);

Answer 1

You can use the LINQ Concat and ToList methods:

var allProducts = productCollection1.Concat(productCollection2)
                                    .Concat(productCollection3)
                                    .ToList();

Note that there are more efficient ways to do this - the above will basically loop through all the entries, creating a dynamically sized buffer. As you can predict the size to start with, you don't need this dynamic sizing... so you could use:

var allProducts = new List<Product>(productCollection1.Count +
                                    productCollection2.Count +
                                    productCollection3.Count);
allProducts.AddRange(productCollection1);
allProducts.AddRange(productCollection2);
allProducts.AddRange(productCollection3);

(AddRange is special-cased for ICollection<T> for efficiency.)

I wouldn't take this approach unless you really have to though.