c# - Looping through dictionary object

Question

I am very new to .NET, used to working in PHP. I need to iterate via foreach through a dictionary of objects. My setup is an MVC4 app.

The Model looks like this:

public class TestModels
{
    Dictionary<int, dynamic> sp = new Dictionary<int, dynamic>
    {
        {1, new {name="abc", age="1"}},
        {2, new {name="def", age="2"}}
    }
}

Controller:

public class TestController : Controller
{
   Models.TestModels obj = new Models.TestModels();
}

How do I loop through the obj object and retrieve the values of the dictionary and print them in the view?

Answer 1

One way is to loop through the keys of the dictionary, which I recommend:

foreach(int key in sp.Keys)
    dynamic value = sp[key];

Another way, is to loop through the dictionary as a sequence of pairs:

foreach(KeyValuePair<int, dynamic> pair in sp)
{
    int key = pair.Key;
    dynamic value = pair.Value;
}

I recommend the first approach, because you can have more control over the order of items retrieved if you decorate the Keys property with proper LINQ statements, e.g., sp.Keys.OrderBy(x => x) helps you retrieve the items in ascending order of the key. Note that Dictionary uses a hash table data structure internally, therefore if you use the second method the order of items is not easily predictable.

Update (01 Dec 2016): replaced vars with actual types to make the answer more clear.