The challenge here is that you need to build an anonymous type in order to have a GroupBy
Expression that can translate to SQL or any other LINQ provider.
I'm not sure that you can do that using reflection (not without some really complex code to create an anonymous type at runtime). But you could create the grouping expression if you were willing to provide an example of the anonymous type as the seed.
public static Expression<Func<TSource, TAnon>> GetAnonymous<TSource,TAnon>(TSource dummy, TAnon example)
{
var ctor = typeof(TAnon).GetConstructors().First();
var paramExpr = Expression.Parameter(typeof(TSource));
return Expression.Lambda<Func<TSource, TAnon>>
(
Expression.New
(
ctor,
ctor.GetParameters().Select
(
(x, i) => Expression.Convert
(
Expression.Property(paramExpr, x.Name), // fetch same named property
x.ParameterType
)
)
), paramExpr);
}
And here's how you would use it (Note: the dummy anonymous type passed to the method is there in order to make the anonymous type a compile-time Type, the method doesn't care what the values are that you pass in for it.) :
static void Main()
{
var groupByExpression = GetAnonymous(new Frog(), new {IsAlive = true, IsVirulent = true});
Console.WriteLine(groupByExpression);
var frogs = new []{ new Frog{ IsAlive = true, IsVirulent = false}, new Frog{ IsAlive = false, IsVirulent = true}, new Frog{ IsAlive = true, IsVirulent = true}};
var grouped = frogs.AsQueryable().GroupBy(groupByExpression);
foreach (var group in grouped)
{
Console.WriteLine(group.Key);
}
}
Which produces:
Param_0 => new <>f__AnonymousType0`2(Convert(Param_0.IsAlive, Boolean), Convert(Param_0.IsVirulent, Boolean))
{ IsAlive = True, IsVirulent = False }
{ IsAlive = False, IsVirulent = True }
{ IsAlive = True, IsVirulent = True }