Question

I’m currently writing a small app that takes data provided by an SQL stored procedure and makes it available for easy export for non-tech savvy users. I’m trying to make this as generic as possible, in that you should be able to plug in just about any SP and follow my template to have an export utility. I’d like to add a way to get the column names before running the SP from the SP itself. I had assumed you could just run the SP with impossible values so nothing is returned, then get the columns from the resulting VB.NET DataTable. However, if there is no data returned, the column names aren’t returned either. How can I get the column names from the SP without having to hard-code them?

Answer 1

Are Table-Valued User-Defined Functions an option?

Otherwise:

SELECT Column_Name 
from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS 
WHERE Table_Schema = 'dbo' and Table_Name = 'Table_Name'

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188348.aspx

Edit:

Even empty data sets pass the columns to an SqlDataReader.
So, if you’re getting a reader from the SqlCommand object,
call GetSchemaTable() on the reader to get a DataTable
with column metadata.
The first column of each row is the name of the return column.