Walter,
First, I don't see OO and relational as mutually exclusive.
Second, with a bit of creativity, one can fairly easily write generic functions in C# (or VB.NET), using existing ADO.NET capabilities, to do something similar to what you're describing.
As an example, while there's an equivalent to SEEK (just define a primary key for a data table and then do an ADO.NET FIND) and there's an equivalent to FILTER and SORT, there isn't a LOCATE (at least not that I'm aware)...however, one can do something like this (I'm typing this as an example)...
DataRow DrLookup = LocateRow("Kevin","FirstName",dtEmployees);
if(DrLookup!=null)
// found
else
// not found
private DataRow LocateRow(string cText,string cColumnName,DataTable dtSearch)
{
DataRow DrReturn =null;
for(int iRowCtr=0;iRowCtr
if(dtSearch.Rows[iRowCtr][cColumnName].ToString()==cText)
{
DrReturn = dtSearch.Rows[iRowCtr];
break;
}
return DrReturn;
}
Now, this is still pretty basic, but you could extend this, like adding an optional parameter for where to start, whether to do an exact match or a substring search, etc.
Bottom line is that one can put together a set of functions in ADO.NET to handle the type of data munging that we've all done in VFP for years.
Kevin
