Chapter 6. DataSets

The DataSet is a memory-resident representation of data including tables, relationships between the tables, and both unique and foreign key constraints. It is used for working with and transporting data in a disconnected environment.

There are four important characteristics of the DataSet:

• It's not provider-specific. It's impossible to tell by looking at the DataSet, or at the objects contained within the DataSet, which provider was used to retrieve the data or what the original data source was. The DataSet provides a consistent programming model regardless of the data source.

• It's always disconnected. Information is retrieved from the data source and placed in the DataSet using another ADO.NET object—the DataAdapter. At no point does a DataSet directly reference a Connection object.

• It can track changes made to its data. The DataSet contains multiple versions of each row of data in the tables, which allows changes to be updated back to the data source using a DataAdapter object, changes to be cancelled, and XML DiffGrams of the changes to be created.

• It can contain multiple tables. Unlike the traditional ADO Recordset, the DataSet approximates a relational database in memory.

DataSets exist as both untyped and strongly typed. Strongly typed DataSets are a collection of automatically generated classes that inherit from the DataSet, DataTable, and DataRow classes, and provide additional properties, methods, and events based on the DataSet schema. A strongly typed DataSet can make programs more intuitive to write and allows the Visual Studio .NET IDE to provide functionality such as autocomplete and for the compiler to detect type mismatch errors and misspelled names during compilation rather than at runtime. Strongly typed DataSets are discussed in detail in Chapter 13.

The data stored in the DataSet can be manipulated programmatically and populated using a DataAdapter or from XML documents or streams. The actual DataSet schema can be created programmatically, read from a data source, read from an XML schema, or inferred from an XML document or stream. The DataSet can easily be serialized to XML for marshalling between processes with .NET remoting or to meet persistent storage requirements.

Figure 6-1 shows the structure of the DataSet and the contained classes.

Figure 6-1. The DataSet class