Question

Fairly new to .Net here and having trouble with a line of code. I have a routine in a custom class that is assigning values to an object based on data from a table row. However, several tables may be used to update these values and only have some of the fields in common. Therefore, I want to check each field value to make sure it exists before I attempt to access it’s value to assign to my object. However, I am getting the error “Column x Does Not Belong To Table.” Any suggestions as to how I might be able to accomplish this without throwing an error?

        'error occurs on first line
        If Not memberRow.Item("nickname") Is Nothing Then
            returnval.NickName = Trim(memberRow.Item("nickname").ToString)
        End If

Answer 1

If the column doesn’t exist, the Item method will throw an exception.

Probably the easiest solution is:

Dim wIndex As Integer

wIndex = memberRow.Table.Columns.IndexOf("nickname")
If wIndex <> -1 Then
   returnval.NickName = Trim(memberRow.Item(wIndex).ToString)
Else
   returnval.NickName = String.Empty
End IF