Question

Basically just pulling a date out in YYYYMMDD and I can do this fine in a query analyzer but when I try to run this query in C# I keep getting a column not found error it also seems to have a hard time doing concatenation (but that isn’t so much of a problem) so a little unsure of what is happening here..I really just want my to_char function to work. Ideas? Thanks!

  string oradb = "user id=x;password=x;data source=(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)"
        +"(HOST=x)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=x)));";

    OracleConnection conn = new OracleConnection(oradb);
    conn.Open();

    OracleCommand cmd = new OracleCommand();
    cmd.Connection = conn;
    cmd.CommandType = CommandType.Text; 
    cmd.CommandText =
        "SELECT to_char(ProblemDate, 'yyyymmdd'), data1, data2,"
        +"data4, data5, data6"
        +" WHERE ( ProblemDate >='03-oct-2011' ) "
        +"AND ( ProblemDate <= '08-oct-2011' ) AND " 
        +"( data1 in ( '3','5','6' ) )";
    OracleDataReader dr = cmd.ExecuteReader();

    string fileOut1 = Request.PhysicalApplicationPath;
    string fileOut = fileOut1 + "Text5.txt";
    // Creates the file
    StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(fileOut);
    if (dr.HasRows)
    {
        while (dr.Read())
        {
            string data1= (string)dr["data1"].ToString();
            string data2 = (string)dr["data3"].ToString();
            string data3 = (string)dr["data4"];
            string data4 = (string)dr["data5"].ToString();
            string data5 = (string)dr["data6"].ToString();
            string ProblemDate = (string)dr["ProblemDate"].ToString();

            //remove the comma
            char[] MyChar = { ',' };

            sw.WriteLine(data1.PadRight(10) + data2.PadRight(5) + data3.TrimEnd(MyChar) + "000" +
                data4 + "000" + data5+  ProblemDate + "  " + "N" );

            Label1.Text = "File created successfully.<br />";
            Label1.Text += fileOut1;
        }
        // Closes the connenction.
        sw.Close();
        conn.Close();
    }
    else
    {
        Label1.Text = "No data written.";
    }

Answer 1

Did you try aliasing the column? eg.

SELECT to_char(ProblemDate, 'yyyymmdd') as ProblemDate, data1, data2 ...

As a side note, you might run into issues with your date comparisons in your WHERE clause. Granted I don’t know anything about your application, client and/or server regional settings and maybe your example was just for illustration purposes, but I’m thinking it would be safer to use TO_DATE than string comparisons:

cmd.CommandText =
    "SELECT to_char(ProblemDate, 'yyyymmdd') as ProblemDate, data1, data2,"
    +"data4, data5, data6"
    +" WHERE ( ProblemDate >= TO_DATE('03-oct-2011', 'DD-MON-YYYY') ) "
    +"AND ( ProblemDate <= TO_DATE('08-oct-2011', 'DD-MON-YYYY') ) AND " 
    +"( data1 in ( '3','5','6' ) )";