>>Thank you for your reply. I wish I knew about this feature before. My ASP.NET application needs to pass a table to a stored procedure. So, I was serializing the table into an XML string and passing it. Very long and kludgy procedure. Now I am thinking if I should change the approach. Any time I change one thing, I brake something else :) Plus, the time of refactoring this code could be spend on something more productive :)
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>My 2 cents, Microsoft was very late in implementing that feature. I realize 2008 seems like a lifetime ago, but they should have implemented it in 2005, when Visual Studio .NET had already gone through multiple iterations.
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>And even then, it doesn't work with other products. You would "think" that SSRS would allow you to pass a data table as a parameter to a stored proc - it doesn't. (Though some people have come up with some workable, though complicated, workarounds)
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>So as a result, MANY developers came up with variations of the process of converting a table to XML (or a comma separated list). Sure, it "works", though the data table approach is cleaner - only problem, by they time they released it, so many had already invested in a solution that changing the code base wasn't always worth it.
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>These days I try to show younger SQL developers how to use it to avoid using a cursor (row-by-row approach)
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>So if what you have "works", I'd say keep it. But for any new development, if you can use it, it's worth doing so.
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>Sorry for the long-winded answer, but this is one of the many reasons I'm glad I'm out of the MVP program and that entire area - I can speak more freely. :)
Thank you for your message. Your input rationalizes my reluctance to change the code that works.
"The creative process is nothing but a series of crises." Isaac Bashevis Singer
"My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all." Oscar Wilde
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." W.Somerset Maugham