Question

I want to add import/export functionality in my C# app…

export my sql server data to file(CSV,XLS,XML)
import the data to sql server from exported file(CSV,XML,XLS)

Kindly suggest in which format(CSV,XML or XSL) I should do import/export as I am fine with any of it.. It just depends how easily I am doing it..

Also provide me the links or directions such that I can get detail of this and start coding on this..

Thanks,
Mahesh

Answer 1

I would stand for CSV file format if your application should trasmit/operate on large amount of data. CSV has low memory footprint, as it’s just comma-separated text. The difficulty with that type of format comes in case of international applications, when you have (say) different decimal seprators on different machines and need to save/restore data form another machine. In this case, you need

• or store in some way culture information in the file
• or define single uniform format for all clients.

For work with CSV you can use A Fast CSV Reader

For small chunks of data, or for trabsmitting it via network or communicating it between different processes you can relay on XML format, which has a huge built-in support in .NET Framework for persistancy, serialization and navigation.

Nothing to say about XLS, cause I try always to avoid them, cause they are proprietary format and not common format for most of IT world. You need to have and Excel installed or you can use some 3rd part libraries, like excellibrary