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Connect to Access Database in C#

Posted on June 14, 2006, 1:58 am EST

Hi, some people have asked me how to access a database within C# ( C Sharp ). So here it is. The example was tested on Visual Studio 2005. It will work fine on other versions (like 7)

Here I will use the Connection Object and the Command object. I will use ADODataReader object which will hold the RecordSet which is dependent upon the query. Please not that this is taken out from a snippet of a pattern that I constructed in one of my projects.

Here are the namespaces we need to use.

CODE:
using System.Data.OleDb;
using System.Data;

Here is the wonderfull compact code :)

CODE:
try
{
    // Initializations
    string FirstName = ""; // Using it to store the db fname
    string database = "PersonDatabase.mdb";
    string connectionString = @"Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" + database;

    // Prepare the connection
    OleDbConnection dbConnection = new OleDbConnection(connectionString);

    // The select query that I will be using
    string query = "SELECT FirstName FROM PersonTable WHERE PersonID = 1";

    // Prepare the Command Object to execute the query
    OleDbCommand command = new OleDbCommand(query, dbConnection);

    // Now lets open the connection
    dbConnection.Open();

    // Lets bind it to a ADO.NET DataReader which will be like a result set
    OleDbDataReader reader = command.ExecuteReader();

    // Lets read one row
    if (reader.Read()) // True a row exists
        // Lets store that column to firstname var
        FirstName = reader.GetString(0).ToString();
    else // Returned nothing
        FirstName = "Empty";

    // Close the connection
    dbConnection.Close();

    // Echo out the Firstname
    Console.WriteLine(FirstName);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
    return e.ToString();
}

What I am trying to do is connecting to the ACCESS Database. I introduced a DataReader Object to be like a ResultSet object.

Once my ADO.NET Database Package is completed, I will release it. It is a api that I made that does an abstraction of DBMS to use. But the example that I showed in this blog connects to the database and gets the name of the person who's id is 1. I hope you understood the code, if you have any problems ... Leave a comment :)

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