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The rarely updated blog of Joel Dixon

Viewing blogs tagged .NET

Friday, June 17, 2005

Java Snob

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 17/06/2005 17:52:00

Java has been my programming language since my first year at university (1999). Before Uni I had toyed with Basic, Turbo Pascal and VBA (Visual Basic behind Access / Excel) for VCE, but my largest programming experience was Batch files on our home computer.

I really took to Java at uni, and programmed a few things in my own time (a calculator and text editor). When I started my graduate job I was put on a Java maintenance project, which I enjoyed a lot for the first few years. Since then, I have also been toying with my shape drawing program in my spare time - which I also enjoy.

I haven't coded much Java lately, as I've been doing .NET work and recently been on a BizTalk Server course which I enjoyed thoroughly. Tonight I decided to play with my shape drawing program and try to get some work done. So I started JBuilder and couldn't start - I've been spoiled by Visual Studio, and .NET development.

JBuilder's Form Designer is shite - and wiring up event processing is tiresome. The IntelliSense was also limited compared to what I've been used to. A mate from work was saying that .NET development was very enjoyable - I'm starting to understand why.

So I've closed by JBuilder - and I'm not sure if I'm going to opening it again from home. Perhaps more Java projects at work will change my mind - but for now I think I'll be happy with .NET.

Unless there's a client that wants an MS-DOS Batch File solution



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Thursday, April 07, 2005

ADO.NET Strongly Typed Relationships

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 07/04/2005 01:55:00
Updated by Joel Dixon at 21/09/2007 04:03:35 - added comment captcha


It's been over a month since my last blog - but that's OK - I'm sure no-one will mind!

I've decided to add a little technical advice about accessing data with Strongly Typed DataSets in ADO.NET. Reason being, I spent over an hour looking for this information before I finally tracked it down on someone's blog. After my post, it will double the amount of blogs with this information

In my ASP.NET WebService, I like to use strongly typed DataSets to access my data with ADO.NET, it's a whole lot cleaner that way. For my example, let's say we have a Customers table, and an Orders table. Customers are identified by their CustomerID, and orders by their OrderID (yes, I'm using Northwind). The Orders table also has the CustomerID that made the order (a one to many relationship). Defining the strongly typed DataSet for this in Visual Studio.NET is quite easy:

  1. Right-click your Project in the Solution Explorer and select Add > Add New Item...
  2. Select "Data Set" from the Templates list, and type the name for your item (CustomersDataSet.cs).
  3. In the Server Explorer, navigate to the Northwind database tables. Drag across the Customers and Orders tables.
  4. Select the Customers table and select Schema > Add > New Relation... from the File Menu.
  5. This is where your relationship is defined. Change the name to CustomersOrders, and change the Child element to Orders. Clicking OK will then create the relationship for you.

Now that you have the strongly typed DataSet, you can directly refer to column names. For example, instead of:

Code:

DataSet1.Tables["Customers"].Rows[0]

you can use:

Code:

DataSet1.Customers[0]

That was all good - but I wanted to look at the Orders that are assigned to a Customer (as per the relationship I added above). Most examples were telling me to do something like this:

Code:

CustomersDataSet.CustomerDataRow customer
= myDataSet.Customers.FindCustomerByID(1);
if (customer != null)
{
// Print out order numbers
foreach (DataRow orderRow in
customer.GetChildRows("CustomerOrders"))
{
Console.WriteLine(orderRow["OrderID"]);
}
}

This gets the job done - but we're back to using things like orderRow["OrderID"] instead of orderRow.OrderID. The disadvantage to using GetChildRows is that it returns an array of DataRow's - not Orders. A way to achieve the above code using your strongly typed relationship is as follows:

Code:

CustomersDataSet.CustomerDataRow customer
= myDataSet.Customers.FindCustomerByID(1);
if (customer != null)
{
// Print out order numbers
foreach (CustomersDataSet.OrderRow orderRow
in customer.GetOrdersRows())
{
Console.WriteLine(orderRow.OrderID);
}
}

When the relationship was created above, it added a GetOrdersRows() method on the CustomersRow object. It may not seem like much - but having the strongly typed OrderRow can help (well, it helped me).

After doing a quick search on GetOrdersRows() (to see if I had missed any examples of this) - I found a good ADO.NET tutorial. I wish I had have found that a few hours ago!



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