Question

I am working with asp.NET and c#, using the MySQL’s connector/NET plug-in thingy to connect to a MySQL db (no surprises there).

And that works fine, can connect, run queries etc etc all fine and dandy, but is it possible to return a Hashtable or similar of the results? Save running a describe on the same table to get the column names and use those values to create the Hash each time.

Answer 1

The MySQL C/C++ connector which I assume to be wrapped around C# (versus re-implemented in C#) returns a two-demential array containing the results. This is only the column and row data, not the column name. The API also returns a field (column name) value through mysql_fetch_field_direct() — a separate function call after obtaining the query results. This too is a two-demential array. The connector itself doesn’t contain API for merging the two separate results (column names + column/row data) into a hash table.

Instead of making a second query to obtain the column names, all you need to do is call mysql_fetch_field_direct() for each column as you progress through assigning values. This gives you the field name along with the data contained in that column/row. At this point it’s up to the developer as to how to arrange that data such as storing it in a hash table, etc.

I use a helper function as a wrapper around query execution that stores each row in a binary tree with the column name being the key and returns a linked list of trees for me to do with what I need.