Question

I am trying to run an event which will search through the different files in a given directory. The goal is to have it search for all files that begin with ‘SP_’, which are .sql files containing Stored Procedures. I would then like to add the full text of these Procedures to an array to be used later. This is causing an error when run, which I believe is because ‘FullProcedureArray()’, the string array I am trying to load does not have defined boundaries. When I declare it as ‘FullProcedureArray(7)’, or with some other value, it appears to run fine. But I don’t want to have to hard-code a boundary for ‘FullProcedureArray’; I would rather let it be defined by whatever the number of files in the folder is.

My question: Is there a way to declare ‘FullProcedureArray’ without having to give it an absolute value? I may just be missing something painfully obvious, but I haven’t worked with this type of array much in the past. Thanks in advance for your help.

    Dim AppDataLocation As String = "C:\Files\TestFiles\"
    Dim ProcedureArray As String()
    Dim ProcedureText As String
    Dim FullProcedureArray() As String

    Dim sourceDirectoryInfo As New System.IO.DirectoryInfo(AppDataLocation)

    Dim fileSystemInfo As System.IO.FileSystemInfo
    Dim i As Integer = 0
    For Each fileSystemInfo In sourceDirectoryInfo.GetFileSystemInfos
        If (fileSystemInfo.Name.Contains("SP_")) Then
            ProcedureArray = System.IO.File.ReadAllLines(AppDataLocation & fileSystemInfo.Name)
            ProcedureText = Join(ProcedureArray, "")
            FullProcedureArray.SetValue(ProcedureText, i)
            i = (i + 1)
        End If
    Next

Answer 1

An array by definition has a fixed upper bound. If you don’t want a fixed upper bound, don’t use an array. Use, for example, a List(Of String) instead:

Dim AppDataLocation As String = "C:\Files\TestFiles\" 
Dim ProcedureList As New List(Of String)

Dim sourceDirectoryInfo As New System.IO.DirectoryInfo(AppDataLocation) 

For Each fileSystemInfo As System.IO.FileSystemInfo In sourceDirectoryInfo.GetFileSystemInfos 
    If (fileSystemInfo.Name.Contains("SP_")) Then 
        Dim ProcedureText As String = _
            System.IO.File.ReadAllText(AppDataLocation & fileSystemInfo.Name) 
        ProcedureList.Add(ProcedureText)
    End If 
Next 

If, for some reason, you still need the result as an array afterwards, simply convert the list to an array:

Dim myArray() As String = ProcedureList.ToArray()