Question

I’m trying to write a function that will return all the available cars for rent from a single table Cars. Cars has carId(int), carManufacturer(varchar), carModel(varchar) and carTaken(bool).

But I am having problem with figuring out what datatype should the function GetAvailableCars() return.

I want to place all of the cars that are rentable(carTaken == false) into a textArea on the web-client’s simple page in a formatted way. I though string[] would be a good choice.

public string[] GetAllAvailableCars()
   {
       var result =
           from car in carsDB.Cars
           where (car.carTaken == false)
           select car;
       return result;
   }

Answer 1

If you want to return a string array, something like:

(from car in carsDB.Cars
 where (car.carTaken == false)
 select car.carModel).ToArray();

Should work

EDIT: Per the request of author, to select all of the columns:

(from car in carsDB.Cars
 where (car.carTaken == false)
 select String.Format(
     "ID: {0}; Manufacturer: {1}; Model: {2}",
     car.carId,
     car.carManufacturer,
     car.carModel
 )).ToArray();

I can’t compile against your Cars class, but I think the above is right. Let me know if you get any errors.