Removing Items From IDictionary With Recursion

Question

Anybody have a slicker way to do this? Seems like it should be easier than this, but I'm having a mental block. Basically I need to remove items from an dictionary and recurse into the values of the items that are also dictionaries.

private void RemoveNotPermittedItems(ActionDictionary menu)
{
    var keysToRemove = new List<string>();
    foreach (var item in menu)
    {
        if (!GetIsPermitted(item.Value.Call))
        {
            keysToRemove.Add(item.Key);
        }
        else if (item.Value is ActionDictionary)
        {
            RemoveNotPermittedItems((ActionDictionary)item.Value);
            if (((ActionDictionary)item.Value).Count == 0)
            {
                keysToRemove.Add(item.Key);
            }
        }
    }
    foreach (var key in (from item in menu where keysToRemove.Contains(item.Key) select item.Key).ToArray())
    {
        menu.Remove(key);
    }
}

Action dictionary is like this:

public class ActionDictionary : Dictionary<string, IActionItem>, IActionItem

Answer 1

You don't really need to collect the keys and iterate them again if you iterate the dictionary in reverse (from 'menu.Count - 1' to zero). Iterating in forward order will, of course, yield mutated collection exceptions if you start removing things.

I don't know what an ActionDictionary is, so I couldn't test your exact scenario, but here's an example using just Dictionary<string,object>.

    static int counter = 0;
    private static void RemoveNotPermittedItems(Dictionary<string, object> menu)
    {
        for (int c = menu.Count - 1; c >= 0; c--)
        {
            var key = menu.Keys.ElementAt(c);
            var value = menu[key];
            if (value is Dictionary<string, object>)
            {
                RemoveNotPermittedItems((Dictionary<string, object>)value);
                if (((Dictionary<string, object>)value).Count == 0)
                {
                    menu.Remove(key);
                }
            }
            else if (!GetIsPermitted(value))
            {
                menu.Remove(key);
            }
        }
    }

    // This just added to actually cause some elements to be removed...
    private static bool GetIsPermitted(object value)
    {
        if (counter++ % 2 == 0)
            return false;
        return true;
    }

I also reversed the 'if' statement, but that was just an assumption that you'd want to do type checking before calling a method to act on the item's value...it will work either way assuming 'GetIsPermitted' always returns TRUE for ActionDictionary.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

While foreach and GetEnumerator fails, a for-loop works,

var table = new Dictionary<string, int>() {{"first", 1}, {"second", 2}};
for (int i = 0; i < table.Keys.Count; i++)//string key in table.Keys)
{
    string key = table.Keys.ElementAt(i);
    if (key.StartsWith("f"))
    {
        table.Remove(key);
    }
}

But ElementAt() is a .NET 3.5 feature.