Question

I’m trying to return the result as a string and I keep erring out at the cmd.ExecuteScalar()

Any suggestions?

    static public string GetScalar(string sql)
{
    string result = "";

    SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(ConnectionString);
    SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(sql, conn);
    conn.Open();

    try
    {
        result = cmd.ExecuteScalar().ToString();
    }
    catch (SqlException ex)
    {
        DBUtilExceptionHandler(ex, sql);

        throw ex;
    }
    finally
    {
        conn.Close();
    }

    return result;
}

I’m passing the following sql statement into sql:

    select count(LeadListID) from LeadLists WHERE SalesPersonID = 1
AND LeadListDateCreated BETWEEN '9/1/11' AND '10/1/11 23:59:59'

which works fine as a query in Server Management Studio.

EDIT:
The method works, I was building my statement with errors. Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

The SqlCommand.ExecuteScalar return an Object type. It executes the query, and returns the first column of the first row in the result set returned by the query.

If you return a count you may need to cast the return value into an Integer

 counter = (Int32)cmd.ExecuteScalar();

Without the exact exception is hard to tell you what you did wrong, but for sure, I won’t use the ToString().