Question

I am a PHP/MySQL developer, slowly venturing into the realm of C#/SQL Server and I am having a problem in C# when it comes to reading an SQL Server query that joins two tables.

Given the two tables:

TableA:

int:id
VARCHAR(50):name
int:b_id

TableB:

int:id
VARCHAR(50):name

And given the query

SELECT * FROM TableA,TableB WHERE TableA.b_id = TableB.id;

Now in C# I normally read query data in the following fashion:

SqlDataReader data_reader= sql_command.ExecuteReader();
data_reader["Field"];

Except in this case I need to differentiate from TableA’s name column, and TableB’s name column.

In PHP I would simply ask for the field "TableA.name" or "TableB.name" accordingly but when I try something like

data_reader["TableB.name"];

in C#, my code errors out.

How can fix this? And how can I read a query on multiple tables in C#?

Answer 1

The result set only sees the returned data/column names, not the underlying table. Change your query to something like

SELECT TableA.Name as Name_TA, TableB.Name as Name_TB from ...

Then you can refer to the fields like this:

data_reader["Name_TA"];