>Naomi,
>
>you already have some answers on how to do it client side in dotnet. But as you probably have some SQL code doing it, why not keep munging in SQL and do the stuff server side ? IMO Dotnet munging sucks...
>

The reason is that I have a stored procedure that returns my result before this extra massaging. The stored procedure actually returns few extra columns I do not need for this particular method.

So, I want to transform on the client, besides, it is a well known fact that extra formatting should be done on the client (.NET application) in this case rather than on the server.

So, this is what I have so far

var results = from r in ds.Tables[0].AsEnumerable()
                                select new {resource1 = r.Field<String>("resource1"),
                                booking_id = r.Field<Int64>("booking_id"),
                                start_time = r.Field<DateTime>("start_time"),
                                end_time = r.Field<DateTime>("end_time"),
                                flex_tspan = r.Field<Boolean>("flex_tspan"),
                                layer = r.Field<Int16>("layer"),
                                backcolor = r.Field<Int32>("backcolor"),
                                forecolor = r.Field<Int32>("forecolor"),
                                clip_sp = r.Field<String>("clip_sp"),
                                clip_loc = r.Field<Int16>("clip_loc"),
                                display_msg = "".PadRight((r.Field<Boolean>("locked"))?2:0) + 
                                (String.IsNullOrEmpty(r.Field<String>("department") + r.Field<String>("category") + 
                                r.Field<String>("item"))?("**"+r.Field<String>("lsndescrip").Trim() + "**").R

                                };

(not finished since I now need replicate function in C# - I found this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3754582/is-there-an-easy-way-to-return-a-string-repeated-x-number-of-times and wondering if I should go with String.Concat or create an extension - (if we don't have it already).