Question

I am automating Microsoft Access from C# like so:

using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Access;

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Application ap = new Application();

    ap.OpenCurrentDatabase("C:\\location.accdb", true);
    ap.DoCmd.WhateverIFeelLike();
    ap.CloseCurrentDatabase();
}

What I want to do here is run one of the select queries stored within Access and return this value either as a string or string array.

I want something like this:

string[] myQueryResult = ap.DoCmd.OpenQuery("qryFoo");

Obviously this doesn’t work but this the kind of thing that I am looking for. As a workaround I am thinking of exporting the query results to a CSV file then using Filehelpers to import this into an Array in C# but I thought I would ask on here first in the hope that there is a more direct route!

Thanks

Answer 1

A possibility is to use OleDb. You need to build your project with “x86” as platform target on 64-bit machines, since the Jet drivers are 32-bit.

const string DatabasePath = @"C:\DbPath\MyDatabase.mdb";
const string ConnectionString = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" +
                                DatabasePath;

using (OleDbConnection cnn = new OleDbConnection(ConnectionString)) {
    string query = "SELECT * FROM qryFoo";
    using (OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand(query, cnn)) {
        cnn.Open();
        using (OleDbDataReader reader = cmd.ExecuteReader()) {
            int employeeIdOrdinal = reader.GetOrdinal("EmployeeID");
            int nameOrdinal = reader.GetOrdinal("Name");
            int salaryOrdinal = reader.GetOrdinal("Salary");
            while (reader.Read()) {
                Console.WriteLine("EmployeeID = {0}", reader.GetInt32(employeeIdOrdinal));
                Console.WriteLine("Name = {0}", reader.GetString(nameOrdinal));
                if (!reader.IsDBNull(salaryOrdinal)) {
                    Console.WriteLine("Salary = {0}", reader.GetDouble(salaryOrdinal));
                }
                Console.WriteLine("---------------");
            }
        }
    }
}

You do not need Access interop for this to work, however a using System.Data.OleDb;