Question

I have taken over an application written by another developer, which reads data from a database, and exports it.

The developer used DataTables and DataAdaptors.

So,

 _dataAdapter = new SqlDataAdapter("Select * From C....", myConnection);

and then

ExtractedData = new DataTable("CreditCards");
_dataAdapter.Fill(ExtractedData);

ExtractedData is then passed around to do different functions.

I have now been told that I need to, in addition to this, get the same format of data from some comma separated text files. The application does the same processing – it’s just getting the data from two sources.

So, I am wondering if I can get the data read into a DataTable, as above, and then ADD more records from a CSV file.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

You might need to use this function to read the data into DataTable from the file.

public DataTable GetDataSourceFromFile(string fileName)
{
    DataTable dt = new DataTable("CreditCards");
    string[] columns = null;

    var lines = File.ReadAllLines(fileName);

    // assuming the first row contains the columns information
    if (lines.Count() > 0)
    {
        columns = lines[0].Split(new char[] { ',' });

        foreach (var column in columns)
            dt.Columns.Add(column);
    }

    // reading rest of the data
    for (int i = 1; i < lines.Count(); i++)
    {
        DataRow dr = dt.NewRow();
        string[] values = lines[i].Split(new char[] { ',' });

        for (int j = 0; j < values.Count() && j < columns.Count(); j++)
            dr[j] = values[j];

        dt.Rows.Add(dr);
    }
    return dt;
}