IEnumerable<T>.ConvertAll & DDD - domain-driven-design

Question

I have an interesting need for an extension method on the IEumerable interface - the same thing as List.ConvertAll. This has been covered before here and I found one solution here. What I don't like about that solution is he builds a List to hold the converted objects and then returns it. I suspect LINQ wasn't available when he wrote his article, so my implementation is this:
public static class IEnumerableExtension
{
public static IEnumerable<TOutput> ConvertAll<T, TOutput>(this IEnumerable<T> collection, Func<T, TOutput> converter)
{
if (null == converter)
throw new ArgumentNullException("converter");
return from item in collection
select converter(item);
}
}
What I like better about this is I convert 'on the fly' without having to load the entire list of whatever TOutput's are. Note that I also changed the type of the delegate - from Converter to Func. The compilation is the same but I think it makes my intent clearer - I don't mean for this to be ONLY type conversion.
Which leads me to my question: In my repository layer I have a lot of queries that return lists of ID's - ID's of entities. I used to have several classes that 'converted' these ID's to entities in various ways. With this extension method I am able to boil all that down to code like this:
IEnumerable<Part> GetBlueParts()
{
IEnumerable<int> keys = GetBluePartKeys();
return keys.ConvertAll<Part>(PartRepository.Find);
}
where the 'converter' is really the repository's Find-by-ID method. In my case, the 'converter' is potentially doing quite a bit. Does anyone see any problems with this approach?

Answer 1

The main issue I see with this approach is it's completely unnecessary.
Your ConvertAll method is nothing different than Enumerable.Select<TSource,TResult>(IEnumerable<TSource>, Func<TSource,TResult>), which is a standard LINQ operator. There's no reason to write an extension method for something that already is in the framework.
You can just do:
IEnumerable<Part> GetBlueParts()
{
IEnumerable<int> keys = GetBluePartKeys();
return keys.Select<int,Part>(PartRepository.Find);
}
Note: your method would require <int,Part> as well to compile, unless PartRepository.Find only works on int, and only returns Part instances. If you want to avoid that, you can probably do:
IEnumerable<Part> GetBlueParts()
{
IEnumerable<int> keys = GetBluePartKeys();
return keys.Select(i => PartRepository.Find<Part>(i)); // I'm assuming that fits your "Find" syntax...
}

Answer 2

Why not utilize the yield keyword (and only convert each item as it is needed)?
public static class IEnumerableExtension
{
public static IEnumerable<TOutput> ConvertAll<T, TOutput>
(this IEnumerable<T> collection, Func<T, TOutput> converter)
{
if(null == converter)
throw new ArgumentNullException("converter");
foreach(T item in collection)
yield return converter(item);
}
}