Question

When working with namespaces such as System.Data.Odbc or System.Data.OracleClient the various data reader methods generally require an integer corresponding to a column be provided to the functions (e.g. OracleDataReader.GetInt32).

My question is this, what is the best way to work with these functions so that the code is fairly self-documenting. Right now, it seems to me that there are three options, namely:

// Option One - Just provide the integer value string myString = oraData.GetString[0];  // Option Two - Provide the integer value using a constant string myString = oraData.GetString[FIELD_NAME];  // Option Three - Provide the column name and use System.Convert to return the correct value string myString = Convert.ToString(oraData['Field_Name']); 

Each of these techniques seem to have there own pros and cons and I’m curious to see what others think, or if there is a better way to do it.

Answer 1

I agree with Andrew Hare, with the addition that I’ve enclosed the functionality in an overloaded extension method that simplifies the operation:

public static string GetStringByName(this OracleDataReader reader,                                       string columnName,                                       string defaultValue) {    string result = defaultValue;    int columnIndex = reader.GetOrdinal(columnName);    if(!reader.IsDbNull(columnName)    {       result = (string) reader.GetString(columnIndex);    }    return result; } 

Anyway, just a refactoring that helped me tremendously.