I am wondering if I got to ditch filehelpers and do this myself as I think I might be going beyond what it was designed for.
I want a user to be able to upload any csv file(maybe in the future excel file). The first row would have the header
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6
once upload it would look like
C1,C2,C3,C4,C5,C6 a,b,c,d,e,f
Now I want to look at the header and basically take certain ones. For instance I want C2, C3, C4. The rest are extra information I don't care about.
Now someone might upload a file that has this header
C1 C2 C3 C4
Again I am looking only for C2, C3, C4.
I know I can have multiple formats but what I am getting at is I want them to be able to basically upload any file with any number of headers(could be 1000 for all I care) and then have my application try to find the information I care about(so in the case of the 1000 headers I maybe only want 3)
Is this possible?
Edit
(based on shamp00 comments)
My goal is to fill in as much data as I possibly can determine, however cases like this might happen. I want C1, C2, C3. They give a file with C1,C3,C4. I got 2 columns of data I need but I don't have C2.
Now I had 2 ideas one was to display the data into 2 tables. Table 1 would have C1, C2, C3 and table 2 would have C1,C3,C4 and they basically take the data they have in table 2 and move the appropriate data into my expected columns.
With this approach I am basically saying "you did not give me 100% what I expected, now you have to format every single row into my format".
The second approach would be 1 table and try to fill in as much data as possible.
For example the user upload the file that has C1,C3,C4. I determine that their are 2 columns that are known but I don't have the full amount of expected data yet.
So I would display all the rows back in a html table to the user with headers of
C1, C2, C3, C4
C1 would be filled in, C2 cells would be blank (as this is the data I am missing from them), C3 would be filled in, C4 would be filled in with (this data was unexpected but who knows it might actually be the data C2 should hold but since they misspelled the header name my program could not figure it out).
Then essentially they would just fill in C2 with data they got from somewhere else or maybe from C4.
Now they only have to fill in 1 column in instead of all the columns that where expect. So in a sense I need a concrete class like MyClass was with C1,C2,C3 but at the same time I need to dynamic so I can hold C4,C5.....Cn.
I would always display C1,C2,C3 first and the rest of these unexpected ones would come after and through the magic of javascript and stuff they could edit the missing info. If nothing is missing they nothing would show up to be edited.
Based on shamp00 comments I am now wondering if I need to return the data as a Data Table(fortunately this seems to be a system class as right now my code is in a service layer and I was return back a Domain Transfer Class as I want to keep my code independent from like web code classes and hence why I was trying to figure out how to the dynamic class FileHelpers generated.).
Then somehow (not 100% sure yet) just keep track where those 3 columns I am really interested are so I know which data is what.
You can use FileHelpers using a technique like the one described in my answer to your other question.
You read the header line to determine which columns are relevant and then traverse the resulting DataTable processing only those columns.
Something like
public class MyClass
{
public string SomeImportantField { get; set; }
public string SomeOtherField { get; set; }
public string AnotherField { get; set; }
}
public IList<MyClass> GetObjectsFromStream(Stream stream)
{
var cb = new DelimitedClassBuilder("temp", ",") { IgnoreFirstLines = 1, IgnoreEmptyLines = true, Delimiter = "," };
var sr = new StreamReader(stream);
var headerArray = sr.ReadLine().Split(',');
foreach (var header in headerArray)
{
var fieldName = header.Replace("\"", "").Replace(" ", "");
cb.AddField(fieldName, typeof(string));
}
var engine = new FileHelperEngine(cb.CreateRecordClass());
List<MyClass> objects = new List<MyClass>();
DataTable dt = engine.ReadStreamAsDT(sr);
foreach (DataRow row in dt.Rows) // Loop over the rows.
{
MyClass myClass = new MyClass();
for (int i = 0; i < row.ItemArray.Length; i++) // Loop over the items.
{
if (headerArray[i] == "ImportantField")
myClass.SomeImportantField = row.ItemArray[i].ToString();
if (headerArray[i] == "OtherField")
myClass.SomeOtherField = row.ItemArray[i].ToString();
if (headerArray[i] == "AnotherField")
myClass.AnotherField = row.ItemArray[i].ToString();
objects.Add(myClass);
}
}
return objects;
}