Question

I have an object called Result<T> that has a constructor which accepts an argument of IEnumerable<T>. I’d like to be able to pass in a datatable if possible.

I tried datatable.AsEnumerable(), but where I bind to the data it was complaining that ‘MyProperty’ is not a field or property on type ‘DataRow’ – which makes sense since ‘MyProperty’ isn’t a property on ‘DataRow’, but it was a column in my datatable.

Is there a way to convert a datatable to something that I can pass into the Result object and still have it bind to, say, a gridview?

Answer 1

I ended up using Linq to convert the datatable into an array of anonymous objects.

Dim objs = From row In dt Select New With {
    .Id = row.Field(Of Integer)("Id"),
    .Count = row.Field(Of Integer)("Count")
}

Then I created a generic function to use type inference to get the anonymous object array into the Result object’s constructor

Private Function GetResult(Of T)(ByVal data As IEnumerable(Of T)) As Result(Of T)
    Return New Result(Of T)(Nothing, data)
End Function

Called using Dim result = GetResult(objs)