How to read columns of SQL Server tables in Visual Studio? - visual-studio

Question

In Microsoft Access functions like DLookup - DMax or Dcount help the programmer to read a column from a table of a SQL Server database.
How do you do the same task in Visual Studio?
For example how can I find the ID of a user (John) in tblUsers table.
tblUsers columns: ID, Username, Password, .....
I've already added the SQL Server database to the Data Source.
Any kind of advice is much appreciated.

Answer 1

ow. Even in Access, that isn't proper.
Go read up on DAO, ADO, and, if you're using Visual Studio to write .Net applications, the system.data namespace.
in general, when accessing relational data via non-database program code, including the vba you're using in Access, you'd retrieve a reference to a Recordset object and query each record's fields as object properties.

Answer 2

If you want to visualize all of the data, click Database Explorer (see the tab at the bottom of the solution explorer), then expand your data connections and right click the name of the table, then click 'show table data'. If you want only the id's or names etc, I usually just create an SQL script to run, and run it when I want to browse certain data.
To simply create a script, while you're viewing all the data, click the script button above the table your viewing. Then you can execute your script
SELECT * FROM tblUsers WHERE User = 'John';
I hope I've understood your questions correctly.

Answer 3

I followed DougM and ended up with the following code. I will add it here just in case somebody else has the same question:
using System.Data.SqlClient; should be added to the reference section
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string fltr = "UserName='Ando'";
MessageBox.Show(ReadOrderData(fltr));
}
public string ReadOrderData(string filter)
{
string connectionString = "Data Source=sqlServer-servername;Initial Catalog=database name;Integrated Security=True";
string queryString = "SELECT User_ID, UserName FROM tblUsers WHERE " + filter + ";";
using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(
connectionString))
{
SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand(
queryString, connection);
connection.Open();
SqlDataReader reader = command.ExecuteReader();
try
{
while (reader.Read())
{
return reader[0].ToString();
//Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0, {1",
// reader[0], reader[1]));
}
}
finally
{
// Always call Close when done reading.
reader.Close();
}
}
return "Null";