Building a Custom Class in ASP.NET and C#

This tutorial will show you how to create your own class in ASP.NET and C#

In this tutorial, we will look at how to create a Custom Class that will represent an object. When working with databases in Web Applications, it is often useful to have an object representing that data, rather than using the built-in types such as a DataTable. By creating your own class, you can gain access to the Properties instead of referencing row and column numbers. An example would be if you're working with data from a database that consisted of a group of people. The columns could be name, age, and telephone. If you used a datatable to retrieve and interact with this data, it could get messy very quickly. But if you created a class to represent the data, then you would be able to programmatically reference the properties (name, age, and telephone) directly.

In this example, we will use a SQL Database and create a class to represent the data. We will keep it simple and use the following columns in the table: ID, Name, Age, Telephone.
Let's begin by starting a new Web Application in Visual Studio. Right-click on the App_Data folder in Solution Explorer, and choose Add New Item.. SQL Server Database. Once it opens up in the Server Explorer window, right-click the Tables folder and choose to Add New Table. Add the following columns and data types:
ID   bigint
Name   varchar(50)
Age   smallint
Telephone   varchar(20)

We also want to make the ID column the Primary Key, and in the properties, set Identity Specification to Yes. Then Save the table, and add the Connection String to the Web.config:

<connectionStrings> <add name="ConnectionString" connectionString="Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;AttachDbFilename=|DataDirectory|\Database.mdf;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> </connectionStrings>

If you're unsure about the Connection String, see ConnectionStrings.com
Now let us begin writing our Class. If you don't have an App_Code folder in your Solution Explorer, right-click your Project and choose to Add ASP.NET Folder > App_Code. Then right-click the App_Code folder and choose to Add New Item.. Class. Give it a name. You should then be presented with something like this:

using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; /// /// Summary description for Person /// public class Person { public Person() { // // TODO: Add constructor logic here // } }

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The first thing we should do is add the Properties. We want the Properties to reflect the columns of the table in the database. We will need to set the data types as well:

#region properties public Int32 ID { get { return _ID; } set { _ID = value; } } private Int32 _ID = 0; public String Name { get { return _Name; } set { _Name = value; } } private String _Name = ""; public int Age { get { return _Age; } set { _Age = value; } } private int _Age = 0; public String Telephone { get { return _Telephone; } set { _Telephone = value; } } private String _Telephone = ""; Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ▼  2011 (1309) ►  August (220) ▼  July (1089) Produce a SAX stream from a DOM Document Sax to DOM converter Create Xml Reader Utility class for xml/sax handling XML utility methods that only depend on the JDK Using XML locator to indicate current parser position Handling SAX errors during parsing Extracting attribute values from XML elements Configuring SAX parser factory to produce alternat... Accessing features of the SAX parser implementation Accessing character data (CDATA) of XML element Simple lister - extract name and children tags A Content Handler to Output a Sorted List A Content Handler to Output a Sorted List as HTML SAX Checker A Program to Display the Input from a SAX Parser Duplicates XML Files SAX Demo Parsing XML Files with SAX is SAXParserFactory NamespaceAware Create SAXParser from SAXParserFactory Return the first element child with the specified ... Resolve relative URIs and SystemID strings into ab... XML constants Create XML validator from XML schema Validate xml against the schema Validate xml against XML Schema Validate Stax Load XML document to a tree with XML stream reader Create a StAX Event Tree Viewer Inline Stream Filter Print XInclude Print DOM out SVG to JPEG SVG Canvas Demo SVG Graphics DDemo XML input, output and transform utilities Transforming an XML File with XSL into a DOM Document Formatting an XML file using Transformer Catch TransformerException Applying XSLT Stylesheets Create an XML file and attach an XSL Transformer with parameters Transforming DOM Node to HTML with JAXP Set the TransformerFactory system property to gene... Processing XML Documents Partially Use the transform.TransformerFactory plugability i... XSLT I18N A Program That Performs XML Transformations XML transformation Use DOM L3 DOMBuilder, DOMBuilderFilter DOMWriter ... Write Xml (Node n, OutputStream os) XMLWriter helper class write Xml DOM Node Write DOM out Convenience methods for writing XML XML Writer Writing a DOM Document to an XML File XML Document Writer Source Update to Handle Stylesheet Parameters Yii Web Service A simple example to show how to use the DOM API Parsing XML with SAX Outputting a DOM with XMLSerializer Adding an Attribute with DOM Adding an Element with DOM Walking a Document with DOM whether the given 32 bit character is a valid XML ... Utility class for working with xml data Source To InputSource Sniffed Xml Reader Common XML constants. JAXP 1.3 Datatype API Whether the given character is a valid XML space. Sniffed Xml InputStream to find out the declaratio... Replaces all XML character entities with the chara... Your won XML binding extends DefaultHandler to create a XML binding Streaming XML XML Databases DOM XML Databases and Tools 2: read from blob XML Databases and Tools 1: read from clob XML Databases and Tools 3 Parse Properties Files Using isEmpty from String class Creates a classification scheme and publishes it t... Display the postal addresses for the contacts of t... Search a registry for organizations that offer ser... It searches a registry for information about organ... JAXR Publish Postal Create an organization and publishes it to a regis... Create a concept and publishes it to a registry Create an organization and publishes it to a registry Obtain all the registry objects owned by the user ... Find and deletes the classification scheme that th... Searches a registry for information about organiza... JAXR Delete Concept Finds and deletes the organization that the JAXRPu... Native XML Data Management with XIS 7 Enter every DOM node into a Swing JTree tree. The ... About Me source code online View my complete profile Ethereal theme. Powered by Blogger.