It seems bizarre to me that this is so difficult.
You can iterate the controls collection and find things, you can iterate me.components.components, but nowhere can I find where a form keeps a collection of its early-bound table adapters. When you add them in at design time and bind them to a control, it shows them on the design window, and it creates them in the design.vb/cs file, and they're available as a property of your form object... but I can't find a way to browse through them and pick one in code, like you can with the control collection (I.E. me.controls.Item("controlname")).
I thought for sure they'd be in components.components, but they're not. The bindingsource objects are in there.
Has anyone ever heard of a way to do this?
If not, maybe my strategy here needs refinement.
Here's the problem:
I'm writing an app that acts as a front end to a pair of databases. The two databases are unrelated, but I have the need to pull data from one to manipulate things in the other. Easy enough, except this pair of databases is duplicated across 7 sites--meaning 14 databases. This app needs to be able to switch which site it's looking at at the click of a button. Usually one would solve this by simply creating one DataTable and one TableAdapter in the dataset for each table/query and just switch connection strings when you want to switch sites. Unfortunately, there are some slight differences between the table structures between these site's databases--meaning the underlying query used to create the table adapter will be different. I need a table adapter for each table at each site.
My solution:
I have two DataSet's in my project, one for each database. Inside each dataset I create a datatable and tableadapter for each table or stored procedure I want to access at each site, so seven of each. They're all named consistently: "SiteTableName" and "SiteTableNameTableAdapter".
In my app I have a global variable to hold the current site name, which gets set when the user selects the site they want to view.
I partial classed the system.windows.forms.form class to extend the functionality of all my forms, and added two hashtable collections to the new subclass--one to hold all the DataTables and one to hold all the TableAdapters. So now I can get a reference to any TableAdapter on my form by doing Me.TableAdapters.GetByName(Site & "TablenameTableAdapter"). Basically, I created a way to access a property of my form without knowing the exact name of that property at design time.
All of this works beautifully--except I have to manually populate the collections in my form_load. This is clunky--and it makes maintaining the forms harder. If I add a new TableAdapter, or new bound control (which automatically creates a tableadapter) I have to remember to manually add it to my collection in form_load. I want to be able to automatically find them all and add them (preferably either in the New() or InitializeComponent() methods) automatically.
Is this all a bad idea?
You can iterate the controls collection and find things, you can iterate me.components.components, but nowhere can I find where a form keeps a collection of its early-bound table adapters. When you add them in at design time and bind them to a control, it shows them on the design window, and it creates them in the design.vb/cs file, and they're available as a property of your form object... but I can't find a way to browse through them and pick one in code, like you can with the control collection (I.E. me.controls.Item("controlname")).
I thought for sure they'd be in components.components, but they're not. The bindingsource objects are in there.
Has anyone ever heard of a way to do this?
If not, maybe my strategy here needs refinement.
Here's the problem:
I'm writing an app that acts as a front end to a pair of databases. The two databases are unrelated, but I have the need to pull data from one to manipulate things in the other. Easy enough, except this pair of databases is duplicated across 7 sites--meaning 14 databases. This app needs to be able to switch which site it's looking at at the click of a button. Usually one would solve this by simply creating one DataTable and one TableAdapter in the dataset for each table/query and just switch connection strings when you want to switch sites. Unfortunately, there are some slight differences between the table structures between these site's databases--meaning the underlying query used to create the table adapter will be different. I need a table adapter for each table at each site.
My solution:
I have two DataSet's in my project, one for each database. Inside each dataset I create a datatable and tableadapter for each table or stored procedure I want to access at each site, so seven of each. They're all named consistently: "SiteTableName" and "SiteTableNameTableAdapter".
In my app I have a global variable to hold the current site name, which gets set when the user selects the site they want to view.
I partial classed the system.windows.forms.form class to extend the functionality of all my forms, and added two hashtable collections to the new subclass--one to hold all the DataTables and one to hold all the TableAdapters. So now I can get a reference to any TableAdapter on my form by doing Me.TableAdapters.GetByName(Site & "TablenameTableAdapter"). Basically, I created a way to access a property of my form without knowing the exact name of that property at design time.
All of this works beautifully--except I have to manually populate the collections in my form_load. This is clunky--and it makes maintaining the forms harder. If I add a new TableAdapter, or new bound control (which automatically creates a tableadapter) I have to remember to manually add it to my collection in form_load. I want to be able to automatically find them all and add them (preferably either in the New() or InitializeComponent() methods) automatically.
Is this all a bad idea?
