Josh Robinson's WebLog

Microsoft Enterprise Library Data Access Block and Strongly Typed Datasets

I am currently working with the Microsoft Enterprise Library and have implemented the Exception, Logging and Data Access blocks (and thus Configuration since it is used by these).  At first I was concerned that the Data Access block had taken a step backward and left out the ability to work with strongly typed datasets.  The documentation makes no explicit mention of how to use strongly typed datasets and focuses instead on filling a standard dataset by using the ExecuteDataSet() method.  I poked around in the source code a bit and noticed that ExecuteDataSet() is actually creating a new DataSet and passing it to LoadDataSet() to do all the heavy lifting.  I also found a little bullet point in the "fine print" Usage Notes section of Using a DataSet to Retrieve Multiple Rows that says:

If you want to reuse an existing DataSet instead of creating a new one to hold the results of your query, use the LoadDataSet method in the Database class.

Interesting. . . and it works with existing Typed DataSets too!  Simply execute the following command to populate an existing instance of a Typed DataSet:

VB: myDB.LoadDataSet(myCommandWrapper, CType(myTypedDS, DataSet), "DataTableName")
CS: myDB.LoadDataSet(myCommandWrapper, (DataSet)myTypedDS, "DataTableName");