Question

I’ve got a DB table with three fields, Category, Name, and value (string, string, int). Category and Name together are the primary key. My intent now is to write a method to return the contents of this table sorted into a

List<List<string>>

where each List is a list of entries with the same category (and the first string is the category). How can I do this, or am I going about this the wrong way?

EDIT: The reason I’ve chose this data type is that I will be filling HTML tables with the data, and would just like to iterate with nested foreach loops.

foreach(List<string ls in List<List<string>>)
   use a foreach(string) to generate a table for ls

Answer 1

I have a feeling you are going about this the wrong way. I would create a simple class

class Item
{
    public string Category {get; set;}
    public string Name{get; set;}
    public string Value {get; set;}
}

and manage List<Item> instead.