From DataTable in C# .NET to JSON

Question

I am pretty new at C# and .NET, but I've made this code to call a stored procedure, and I then want to take the returned DataTable and convert it to JSON.

    SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection("connection string here");
    SqlDataAdapter da = new SqlDataAdapter();
    SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("getDates", con);
    SqlParameter par = new SqlParameter("@PlaceID", SqlDbType.Int);
    par.Value = 42;
    da.SelectCommand = cmd;
    cmd.Parameters.Add(par);
    DataSet ds = new DataSet();
    DataTable dt = new DataTable();

    con.Open();

    try{
        cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;
        da.Fill(ds);
    }

My question then is what is the best/simplest way to do that? An example would be great as I'm still very new to this.

Answer 1

Instead of a datatable you should use a datareader. Your code is inefficient and somewhat hard to read - you may want to do something like this:

StringBuilder json = new StringBuilder();

using(SqlConnection cnn = new SqlConnection(your_connection_string)) 
{
    cnn.open();

    using(SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("name_of_stored_procedure", cnn)) 
    {
        cmd.Paramters.AddWithValue("@Param", "value");

        using(SqlDataReader reader = cmd.ExecuteReader()) 
        {
            while(reader.Read()) 
            {
                json.AppendFormat("{{\"name\": \"{0}\"}}", reader["name"]);
            }
        }
    }

    cnn.close();
} 

you can then use json.ToString to get the outpt