ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

11.14. Enumerating .NET Data Providers

Problem

You need a list of .NET data providers installed on the machine running your code.

Solution

Use the static GetFactoryClasses() method of the DbProviderFactories class to return information about installed data providers.

The C# code in Program.cs in the project EnumerateDataProviders is shown in Example 11-17.

Example 11-17. File: Program.cs for EnumerateDataProviders solution

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.Common;

namespace EnumerateDataProviders
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            DataTable dt = DbProviderFactories.GetFactoryClasses(  );
            foreach (DataRow row in dt.Rows)
                Console.WriteLine("{0}\n {1}\n {2}\n {3}\n",
                row["Name"], row["Description"], row["InvariantName"],
                row["AssemblyQualifiedName"]);

            Console.WriteLine("Press any key to continue.");
            Console.ReadKey(  );
        }
    }
}

The output is shown in Figure 11-16.

Discussion

The static GetFactoryClasses() method of the DbProviderFactories class introduced in .NET Framework 2.0 returns a DataTable containing the information shown about all installed providers that implement the abstract base class DbProviderFactory. The schema of the DataTable is shown in Table 11-10.

Figure 11-16. Output for EnumerateDataProviders solution

Table 11-10. Data provider information columns

Column name	Description
Name	Data provider name.
Description	Data provider description.
InvariantName	A unique ...