Question

Just wondering what is best practice for getting the values of a datareader. For example:

I have been doing this:

MyValue = Dr('ColumnName') 

But have noticed other people doing:

MyValue = Dr.GetString('ColumnName') 

I am intested to know the benifits of the 2nd method

Answer 1

I’ve been using a wrapper that does a similar thing for a while that does the trick nicely.

       RowHelper helper = new RowHelper(Dr);      MyValue = helper.IntColumn('ColumnName');  

The nice thing about this is the helper will return pre-defined defaults for NULL columns (this is configurable). I’ve got methods for all the main SQL data types.

To answer your question, the second method has some boxing / unboxing overhead but it would probably be a waste of your time to optimise this for a typical business application.