Converting a DataSet to a Generic List
Introduction
In this article, I present a set of classes that can be used to create a generic List<T>
from a specified DataSet
object. This could be useful in cases where we have data for a specified entity loaded into a DataSet
and need to easily construct a generic List<>
of that entity type.
To demonstrate the usage, we will consider the following scenario: We have to get an Address Book application running. We are using a database for storage, and have created the following tables:
- Contact - Contains details about a contact
- Address - Contains details about an address
- ContactAddress - Maps a contact to multiple addresses
With this data model in mind, we proceed to write two stored procs, one to get all contacts in the system, and one to get the contact details given the contact ID. While listing all contacts, we only need the contact ID and the contact name to be displayed. While getting the contact details, we need all the contact details and the list of addresses the contact has.
Comments