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Apply for our Mentorship Program by emailing your resume to chris.williams@techguilds.com. Check out our ASP.NET QuickStart and C# QuckStart Libraries. Below is my latest articles.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Reading CSV or Tab delimited files from C#

Read data from a CSV files or Tab delimited file is very common especially in the era of big data where you get a large flat file exported, transformed and then reloaded. I am often shocked to see that people write their own algorithm for this when a very powerful module already exists and is free.

CSVhelper is available on GitHub and in its post basic usage you create a class file in your solution with the field name matching the fields in your Comma Separated file.  Then you simply do this:
  • Create a class to store your data

       class myRecord { public string Id { get; set;} public string Name {get; set;} }
  • Write code to open your file stream
  • Reference the CsvHelper dll
  • place a using statement for the CsvHelper at the top of your module

    using CsvHelper;
  • Use code similar to this where myFileStream is the stream you opened and myRecord is your class to fill with the data:

      using (var csv = new CsvReader(myFileStream))  {
         var recordList = csv.GetRecords().ToList();
     }
  • Voila, the variable recordList is a list that contains an instance of myRecord per row in your file.
Now this will read a comma-separated file but what if your file is tab delimited.  Well that is just as simply create a configuration object and assign delimiter:
      CsvConfiguration config = new CsvConfiguration();
      config.Delimiter = "\t";


Now pass this configuration object into your call:

           using (var csv = new CsvReader(myFileStream, config))
          {
              var recordList = csv.GetRecords().ToList();
          }

This same library can be used to write to a CSV to Tab Delimited file. You would make a call something like this:

            // Write the file
            using (var swFlat = new StreamWriter(connectionString))
            {
                using (var csvwriteFlat = new CsvWriter(swFlat))
                {
                    if (recordList != null) csvwriteFlat.WriteRecords(recordList);
                }
            }


Sunday, April 16, 2017

Running Powershell Scripts from your Application

I have been working on a Feed Processing Library for many years now.  It featured its own simple Automation Script however in recent years I have seen the power of PowerShell scripts and am integrating it into my Feed Processor.  While doing this, I made notes below so it would help you through the same process of using it in your applications.

The first step is adding the reference to System.Management.Automation.dll to your solution. Although there are many ways to do this Rasik Bihari answered the best way to do it: Thanks Rasik Bihari for the answer.
System.Management.Automation dll is now published as "System.Management.Automation" nuget package here. Just add a reference to this nuget package from visual studio nuget package manager in your project and get going.
It shows like this in your packages.config file once you have installed the above mentioned nuget package in your project: 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<packages>
  <package id="System.Management.Automation.dll" version="10.0.10586.0" targetFramework="net452" />
</packages>
Once added, you can follow the recipe on how to run PowerShell Script from C#.