I have never been a fan of directly passing IDataRecords, or IDataReaders for that matter, about the place to get simple field values out.
Therefore, with the introduction of C# 3.0 and Extension Methods, I thought it would be cool to write (and share) a simple implementation of some code that I use to convert the IDataRecord Field data to an Dictionary<string, object> object.
namespace Kinlan.Data.Extensions{ public static class DataExtensions { public static Dictionary<string, object> FieldsToDictionary(this IDataRecord dataRecord) { Dictionary<string, object> fieldBag = new Dictionary<string, object>(dataRecord.FieldCount); if (dataRecord != null) { for (int fieldIdx = 0; fieldIdx < dataRecord.FieldCount; fieldIdx++) { string name = dataRecord.GetName(fieldIdx); object value = dataRecord[fieldIdx]; fieldBag.Add(name, value); } } return fieldBag; } }}It is quite simple really and nothing too complex.
A place where it can be used it Windows Workflow. If you are injecting parameters into your Workflow instance you need to pass a Dictionary<string, object> in, well now you can (if you desired) simply convert a IDataReader/IDataRecord object into with the following simple piece of code:
WorkflowInstance instance = runtime.CreateWorkflow(typeof(_WorkflowClass_), dataReaderInstance.FieldsToDictionary());
This code should be used sparingly, for instance if you wanted a very high performance access to the field data, you might as well stay on the IDataRecord.
