Question

I want to create a class structure that can represent the following heirarchichal structure of objects all of the same type

-Parent1
- - Child1 
- - - ChildA of Child1
- - - ChildB of Child1
- - Child2 
- - - ChildA of Child2
- - - ChildB of Child2
- Parent2

The datatable rows have an ID, ParentID, name and level

level is O for Parent, 1 for Child 1 , 2 for ChildA and so on

I’m able to return the data from the DB to a datatable but am struggling after that
any help on creating the class structure and then populating the object would be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

Here is an example on how to do that using LINQ. First a sampe datatable. I assume that top-level items have a parent ID of 0.

var dataTable = new DataTable();
dataTable.Columns.Add("Id", typeof(Int32));
dataTable.Columns.Add("ParentId", typeof(Int32));
dataTable.Columns.Add("Name", typeof(String));
dataTable.Rows.Add(new Object[] { 1, 0, "A" });
dataTable.Rows.Add(new Object[] { 2, 1, "B" });
dataTable.Rows.Add(new Object[] { 3, 1, "C" });
dataTable.Rows.Add(new Object[] { 4, 0, "D" });
dataTable.Rows.Add(new Object[] { 5, 4, "E" });

A class to represent each item of data:

class Item {

  public Int32 Id { get; set; }

  public String Name { get; set; }

  public IEnumerable<Item> Children { get; set; }

}

A function to get the children of a specific item:

IEnumerable<DataRow> GetChildren(DataTable dataTable, Int32 parentId) {
  return dataTable
    .Rows
    .Cast<DataRow>()
    .Where(row => row.Field<Int32>("ParentId") == parentId);
}

A function to create an item including the child collection. This function will recurse down the hierarchy:

Item CreateItem(DataTable dataTable, DataRow row) {
  var id = row.Field<Int32>("Id");
  var name = row.Field<String>("Name");
  var children = GetChildren(dataTable, id)
    .Select(r => CreateItem(dataTable, r))
    .ToList();
  return new Item { Id = id, Name = name, Children = children };
}

A function to get rows of the top-level items:

IEnumerable<DataRow> GetTopLevelRows(DataTable dataTable) {
  return dataTable
    .Rows
    .Cast<DataRow>()
    .Where(row => row.Field<Int32>("ParentId") == 0);
}

Putting it all together:

var items = GetTopLevelRows(dataTable)
  .Select(row => CreateItem(dataTable, row))
  .ToList();