Question

A project I’m working on contains an MDB (acecss database) file. I’d like to export the contents of the tables to text, but am having a hard time finding a way to do it easily using C#. Is there a faster way than using OLEDB and queries?

Update:
Ideally I’d like to not have to statically name each table (there are hundreds) and I have to use .NET 2.0 or below.

Answer 1

There might be a more efficient way, but you could populate the data into a DataTable, and then export to a text file:

Getting data into the DataTable:

string connString = "Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;data source=C:\\marcelo.accdb";

DataTable results = new DataTable();

using(OleDbConnection conn = new OleDbConnection(connString))
{
    OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand("SELECT * FROM Clientes", conn);
    conn.Open();
    OleDbDataAdapter adapter = new OleDbDataAdapter(cmd);
    adapter.Fill(results);
}

Exporting the DataTable to CSV:

EDIT I haven’t tested this, but something like this should work for .NET 2.0.

//initialize the strinbuilder
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();    

//append the columns to the header row
string[] columns = new string[dt.Columns.Count - 1];
for (int i = 0; i < dt.Columns.Count; i++)
    columns[i] = dt.Columns[i].ColumnName;
sb.AppendLine(string.Join(",", columns));          

foreach (DataRow row in dt.Rows)
{
    //append the data for each row in the table
    string[] fields = new string[row.ItemArray.Length];
    for (int x = 0; x < myDataRow.ItemArray.Length; x++)        
        arr[x] = row[x].ToString();                
    sb.AppendLine(string.Join(",", fields));
}

File.WriteAllText("test.csv", sb.ToString());