Populate Azure Table Storage Tables in C#

Question

I am trying to find a good way how to populate Tables of Azure Table Storage just once with C#. Right now, I am creating the tables I need at startup using the CloudTable.CreateIfNotExistAsync(). I mean I could check if the initial entries I need, are already inside and if not create them but maybe there is a more clever way to do it. Maybe the C# SDK has some mechanisms I didn't recognize yet.

Answer 1

I mean I could check if the initial entries I need, are already inside and if not create them but maybe there is a more clever way to do it. Maybe the C# SDK has some mechanisms I didn't recognize yet.

For your scenario, I would recommend InsertOrReplace operation on entities which will either create an entity if it doesn't exist or replace it if it exists.

var account = CloudStorageAccount.Parse("UseDevelopmentStorage=true");// new CloudStorageAccount(new StorageCredentials(accountName, accountKey), true);

var tableClient = account.CreateCloudTableClient();

var table = tableClient.GetTableReference("Customer");
table.CreateIfNotExists();

var entity = new DynamicTableEntity("partitionkey", "rowkey");
entity.Properties.Add("key", new EntityProperty("value"));

var operation = TableOperation.InsertOrReplace(entity);

var result = await table.ExecuteAsync(operation);

Other option could be to try to create an entity and catch StorageException that will be thrown if the entity already exists.