ADO.NET in a Nutshell

DataReaders and Schema Information

Schema information is information about the structure of your data. It includes everything from column data types to table relations.

Schema information becomes extremely important when dealing with the ADO.NET DataSet, as you’ll learn in the following chapters. However, even if you aren’t using the DataSet, you may want to retrieve some sort of schema information from a data source. With ADO.NET, you have two choices: you can use the DataReader.GetSchemaTable( ) method to retrieve schema information about a specific query, or you can explicitly request a schema table from the data source.

Retrieving Schema Information for a Query

As long as a DataReader is open, you can invoke its GetSchemaTable( ) method to return a DataTable object with the schema information for the result set. This DataTable will contain one row for each column in the result set. Each row will contain a series of fields with column information, including the data type, column name, and so on.

Example 5-6 shows code to retrieve schema information for a simple query.

Example 5-6. Retrieving the schema information for a query

// GetSchema.cs - Retrieves a schema table for a query using System; using System.Data; using System.Data.SqlClient; public class GetSchema { public static void Main() { string connectionString = "Data Source=localhost;" + "Initial Catalog=Northwind;Integrated Security=SSPI"; string SQL = "SELECT * FROM CUSTOMERS"; // Create ADO.NET objects. SqlConnection ...