Making generic getters and setters

Question

I have a problem where I have to get the column names and their values from all the Tables in my schema and show that the result in a grid. I have used the direct approach for this but I have to implement the SqlSiphon structure. For this I have to make getters and setters of each of the column of each Table in the schema which is impossible.

What should I use to get the Column names and their values dynamically from the table.

SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS 
WHERE 
TABLE_NAME = '" + @Tablename1 + "' AND TABLE_SCHEMA='dbo'"

What will be the best dynamic solution? And what will be Best to use List , Dictionay or something like 2d Array which will give the column names as well as column values?

Answer 1

A few suggestions:

• I'm not completely clear on what you're trying to achieve, but consider using an ORM (Linq2SQL, WEF, NHibernate)
• In .NET, a suitable type to represent a database table would be a DataTable

Edit : After a few more re-reads I think I understand what you're asking - you already have a database/schema and you want to automatically create the entity classes needed by SqlSiphon. This is called "database-first" (as opposed to model-first). However, from a brief scan of the SqlSiphon documentation it appears it does not support database-first. Is this why you are trying to put the columns into a grid - to make it easier to manually create the entity classes for SqlSiphon?

Edit2 : Note that trying to use an ORM on top of a database whose schema is frequently modified will be problematic. My next guess is that you're trying to figure out how to create an entity class in SqlSiphon which you can use to retrieve database schema information like table columns? I'm still struggling to understand what you're actually asking here - perhaps you can update your question?

Edit3 : I think the answer to your question is take a different approach to your design - ORM's like SqlSiphon are not intended to be used to retrieve and modify the database schema itself.

Answer 2

Might be worth taking a step back an comparing against how other people solve similar problems.

Typically, each table on a database represents an entity, and you also have a class per entity, and you may use an ORM system to avoid duplication of work. So, in a typical system, you have a table for customers, and a table for invoices, and a table for invoice lines, etc. and then a class that represents a customer, a class for an invoice, a class for an invoice line, etc. As you later add functionality (and possible columns/properties) you change the classes, rather than just seeing what columns are on the database - you can of course decorate these with XML documentation and get Intelisense goodness.

There are many ORM systems out there, and each have their strengths and weaknesses, but I personally like LINQ to SQL for adding onto an existing data model.