ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

6.3. Converting a DataReader to a DataTable

Problem

You need to transfer data from a DataReader to a DataTable.

Solution

Use either the Load( ) method of the DataTable class or programmatically create a DataTable from the DataReader metadata schema and load the data from the DataReader into the DataTable. The solution demonstrates both approaches.

To show the first approach, a DataReader is created returning all records in the Person.Contact table in AdventureWorks. The Load( ) method of the DataTable is used to load the DataReader into a DataTable. The first five rows from the DataTable are output to the console.

To show the second approach, a DataReader is created, returning all records in the Person.Contact table in AdventureWorks. Next, a DataTable schema is created in the destination DataSet using the schema information returned by the GetSchemaTable( ) method of the DataReader. Then, the GetData( ) method of the DataReader loads each row of data into an array of objects, and adds it to the DataTable using the Add( ) method of the contained DataRowCollection. The first five rows from the DataTable are output to the console.

The C# code in Program.cs in the project ConvertDataReaderToDataTable is shown in Example 6-3.

Example 6-3. File: Program.cs for ConvertDataReaderToDataTable solution

using System; using System.Data; using System.Data.SqlClient; using System.Collections.Generic; namespace ConvertDataReaderToDataTable { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { string sqlConnectString ...