Protecting Your Data Integrity with Transactions in ADO.NET

Transactions are a feature offered by most enterprise-class databases for making sure data integrity is maintained when data is modified. Maintaining data integrity protects the quality of the data that your organization relies upon; after all, when you generate a report or engage in some other data-driven procedure, you want to know that the information you are working with is correct. A successful transaction must pass the "ACID" test, that is, it must be: * Atomic – All statements

More ADO .NET Objects

We now know how to access data and put it into a simple, readable form in our ASP .Net web pages, but there's so much more! In this article I am going to explain several more key objects that allow us to efficiently access our data in .Net. I will be using the OleDb flavor of ADO .Net classes for those of you who are not working with SQL Server, but just remember that if you are a SQL Server user, the difference is only in the naming of the classes you use and the connection string (refer to Par

Quick Start on Data Access with ADO.NET

If you are anything like I was when you began your search for knowledge on Microsoft's .NET technology, you were quite confused when first confronted with ADO.NET and how to implement it within your ASP.NET pages. This series of articles will first be a simple overview of what ADO.NET is, and second, will be a look at the specific objects and functionality that make up ADO.NET as a whole. My hope is that this series of articles will be beneficial to intermediate as well as advanced developers wh

Reading Data into an ASP.NET Page

All right, so you're tired of hearing the theory and concepts behind ADO.NET. Me too. Let's look at and discuss some techniques and code that will allow us to read data into our ASP.NET web pages. I am going to be using the "pubs" database that ships with SQL Server to demonstrate the examples. I will also be introducing one ASP.NET control that we are going to use to display the data we retrieve: the ASP DataGrid. Although this control will not be covered at length, you will get a sense of its

Building a Data Navigator Control

The SqlDataNavigator control that I have worked on in the last two installments of Cutting Edge is a Web control that supports two-way data binding. The control features a form-based user interface to display all the contents of a table row. The form's data-bound elements are surrounded by a toolbar with navigation buttons and links for operations such as insertion, deletion, and update. Figure 1 shows the control. Last month, I extended it to support joined fields in both view and edit mode. As

Vertical Graphing of Database Data

Recently a client asked me if I could "graph" their divisional standings on a Web page for their automotive division. At first thought, this seemed relatively easy, till I got well into the project! Figuring on sourcing some code for what I needed from the Web led only to a half a day of searching and reading and then downloading of code that wasn't at all right till I finally realized that I'd have to do the basic work myself...sigh, so much for easy street on this one! What follows then her

Using the .NET Framework Data Provider for Oracle

Although MS SQL Server is gaining more popularity on Windows world, if your database layer resides on Unix, you have to interact with Oracle databases mainly. If you've had to access an Oracle database from an ASP.NET application you've likely been using, up until now, the generic OleDb drivers. This generic OleDb data provider is the data provider for any OleDb-compliant data source, such as Access, SQL, Excel, Oracle, etc. The problem with a generic data provider is that it is not tweaked t

Data Access with ASP.NET

One of ASP's greatest features is the ease with which an ASP page can access, retrieve, and modify database information. ASP.NET, the next generation of ASP, offers data access, but offers a new means to retrieve the data: ADO+! (For more information on ASP.NET, be sure to read our ASP.NET Article Index!) This article discusses what ADO+ is and how to use it in an ASP.NET page to access a database. Also, since ADO+'s syntax and style differs rather dramatically from ADO, I will illustrate how to

Paging Database Results in ASP.NET

This article examines how to create a databound listbox using ASP.NET. For more information on ASP.NET be sure to check out the articles in the ASP.NET Article Index. The code in this article is based on the Beta 2 version of ASP.NET. To learn more about the free ASP.NET Beta 2, be sure to check out this FAQ.

Using Parameterized Query in ASP.NET

One of the cool and useful things ADO.NET supports is the use of parameterized queries. Parameterized queries aren't a new feature, in fact some of you may already use them in traditional ASP programming. For those not familiar with parameterized queries they are queries that have one or more embedded parameters in the SQL statement. This method of embedding parameters into a SQL statement is, in my opinion, more straightforward and less prone to error than the method of dynamically building up

Creating a DataBound List of Radio Buttons

This article examines how to create a databound listbox using ASP.NET. For more information on ASP.NET be sure to check out the articles in the ASP.NET Article Index. The code in this article is based on the Beta 2 version of ASP.NET. To learn more about the free ASP.NET Beta 2, be sure to check out this FAQ.

All You Need To Know About ADO.NET

Fundamentally, almost all business applications need some type of access to data. In addition, many a time, business components need to interact with each other using XML and XML based Internet services. This is where ADO.NET comes into picture. Microsoft has provided us with several high level data access API's. The data access method called Data Access Objects or more popularly known as DAO was primarily intended for jet databases and was optimized for it although it could be used for OD

Database access using UDL

UDL is a rather old way of accessing a database (going back to Windows 95 here), but it still works and it another way for the beginner to get access to the database that their using. The samples are for Classic ASP, but I don't suppose that it would take much work to fit them into .NET

Hiding/Manipulating Databound Items

ASP.NET offers a powerful way to render information from a database or XML file: Databinding. However, sometimes you need to be able to perform the databinding for almost all of the items in the data source. Or perhaps you have some special formatting or secondary data that you need to use with each row in the data source, so that you need a little finer control over how the data is bound to the control. In these cases, you will typically need to handle the onItemDataBound event, which is fired

Data Access With ADO.NET

Writing a data access layer (DAL) for .NET using C# can be a tedious process. Following the best practices laid out in the IBuySpy.com sample site means creating a lot of method calls to wrap stored procedure calls. This is not all that different from how one would accomplish the same task using Visual Basic 6 and COM, but the tediousness is somewhat increased by the apparent increase in the number of lines of code required to perform the task. Scott Guthrie has written a wizard tool that helps

ASP.NET/COBOL.NET Database Access

One of the features of the .NET framework is its ability to handle multiple languages. Third party compiler vendors can create and implement a compiler targeted for the .NET runtime. In fact, over the course of the next year, you can expect to see some 28 languages ported to the .NET runtime. This will allow companies with a huge codebase in a "non-Microsoft language" to continue building onto their investment. This article provides COBOL.NET code that accesses SQL Server and binds the result

ASP.NET/Perl.NET Database Access

One of the features of the .NET framework is its ability to handle multiple languages. Third party compiler vendors can create and implement a compiler targeted for the .NET runtime. In fact, over the course of the next year, you can expect to see some 28 languages ported to the .NET runtime. This will allow companies with a huge codebase in a "non-Microsoft language" to continue building onto their investment.

ADO to ADO.NET

If you've used ASP, chances are that you've used ADO. ADO is the most common way for scripting languages to access databases through OLE DB and ODBC. The actual structure of how it all works is quite complicated and I'm not going to really touch down on that, what I am going to do it look at the changes between ADO and ADO.NET.

Using Images and Files with SQL Server

This article is the first in a series of using images and files with SQL Server and focuses first on uploading binary data to the database. The code is actually pretty straight forward, but before talking about the code, let's setup our table. Create a table in your database called "TestFiles" with the following columns/data types (you can alter these as you see fit for length of filename and file type): * ID - Identity (Auto Increment). * MyFileName - Varchar(35). * MyFile -

Create More Efficient Database Code

Using the native data providers in .NET results in more efficient code than using OLE DB. The native providers improve raw performance and enable comfortable data structures to hold data. I'll show you how the .NET data providers are architecturally superior to OLE DB providers by taking the particular case of SQL Server 2000. I'll demonstrate what goes on when you call the classes of both providers, and how SQL Server gets into the game in both cases. I'll show you how this all works by using t