Question

I’m working on an application that displays (highlighted) the dates on which a certain event will occur.
In the database that I have to use there is a table that contains date intervals or collections of dates that have special meaning (like collection of holidays, school breaks…). When an event is defined, the user defines on which day(s) that event occurs (if it occurs periodically), but the user can also define that that particular event does or does not occur on special interval.
For instance – there can be an event that occurs every Sunday, if that days is not a holiday.
Now, I’ve solved the periodical part by reading data from the database for that event (determining on which day does that event occur) and then filling a list with dates that will be highlighted (for graphical representation I use MotnhCalendar and its BoldedDates array):

for (DateTime day = start; day < end;day = day.AddDays(1))
{
    if (Sunday && day.DayOfWeek == DayOfWeek.Sunday)
    {
        MarkedDates.Add(day);
    }
    monthCalendar1.BoldedDates = MarkedDates.ToArray();
}

Now, for this code to work properly, I need to skip the dates that belong to a special interval (in this case if that date is a holiday). It could be easily done by adding another condition into the if clause:

!SpecialDates.Contains(day)

The problem is that I don’t know how to fill the list with these special dates from the database. I can’t simply “hard code” it, because these special date collections/intervals can be changed at any time. So, my question is – how can I, by using SQL and C# commands, read data from database and save it in the list.

Thanks

Answer 1

As it looks like your using SQL Server 2008 R2 I would recommend using an ORM tool like ADO.NET Entity Framework to access your database – best going with the latest release EF 5.

There are tons of tutorials online on how to get up & running with it – a good one being Creating Model Classes with the Entity Framework.

To give you an idea of how simple it makes it, here is an example of the minimal amount of code you would need to achieve what it is your looking to do:

using (var db = new MyDbContext())
{
    var specialDates = db.SpecialDatesTable.ToList();
}