Getting the schema for a table

Question

Given an SQLConnection object how can you get a schema for a single table?

I was trying this the other day and I seemed to be able to get the schema from a DataSet which I'd gotten from running a query, but all the schema info I could get from the connection seemed to be related to what tables were available and not the actual details on the tables.

I'm sure there is a simple way to do this.

Answer 1

This code will do what you want (obviously change the table name, server name etc):

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.Data.SqlTypes;

namespace ConsoleApp
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string query = "SELECT * FROM t where 1=0";
            string connectionString = "initial catalog=test;data source=localhost;Trusted_Connection=Yes";

            DataTable tblSchema;

            using (SqlConnection cnn = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
            {
                using (SqlCommand cmd = cnn.CreateCommand())
                {
                    cmd.CommandText = query;
                    cmd.CommandType = CommandType.Text;
                    cnn.Open();
                    using (SqlDataReader rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.KeyInfo))
                    {
                        tblSchema = rdr.GetSchemaTable();
                    }
                    cnn.Close();
                }
            }
            int numColumns = tblSchema.Columns.Count;
            foreach (DataRow dr in tblSchema.Rows)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", dr["ColumnName"], dr["DataType"]);
            }

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}