Comments by mario_silent (Top 19 by date)

Connecting to your database and retrieving data is part of the business logic, data binding as mentioned above is when you use the data you retrieved in some sort of UI element, it doesn't have to be a dropdown, it can be any control that can hold your data and depends on your app, for winforms you can use DataGridView, a ComboBox, etc. the DropdownList is for web just as the GridView which is similar to the DataGridView.
SO the binding occurs when you assing a DataSource to the Control, which can bea DataSet, DataTable, List, amongst others.

Hi barneyman, thanks for your idea, I think it sounds quite good, I'll have to see with the guy who's actually developing the form in embedded VB 'cause I've never used it before either.
By the way, I've tried running the wmpHost example you're referring to but without any luck, tells me to define some key, I do, and then it says it can't find the wmp.h which I have stored in my pc and I've even explicitly copy/pasted the file to the project and it also gives me an error about some .sbr file for the emulator which can't be found, we're quite confused here but I'll keep trying! thanks for your help

Great! Hope it helped you

I think you can ommit the e as XElement and just leave for each e In records like you had done previously

Well you had the NameOfFirstColumn incorrect lol there you had to write in your case line_id instead of NameOfFirstColumn so I'm glad you made it work! you're welcome and have a nice day buddy

Ok you can select the line_id and the code as a concatenation as in here:

"SELECT line_id, code = Left(line_code & ' ', 11) + ' ' + line_descr FROM Line Order by line_code"

that will return 2 columns so de displayMember will be your second column and your valuemember will be the first column. Check the name:
SecondColumn name is code so:

ComboName.DisplayMember = "code"

Hope this helps buddy

Have you thought about what I suggested? adding a fourth column that combines column 2 and 3 and gives it the format you want? then:

ComboName.DisplayMember = "NameOfFourthColumn"

That's a possibility but also you could use a List<>, populate it and bind it to the comboBox. The drawback here would be that you need to create a new class or struct with 2 properties, one for the ID and the other could be the combination of the column 2 and three. So you bind the List<yourclass struct=""> to the combo and set the DisplayMember to the name of the Property containing the column 2 and 3. I can show you how to do it if you like this option or you can try adding the column to your sql table but it might not be a good choice for you. You're welcome1
!

My bad. It's OleDbDataAdapter and I forgot to initialize the Dataset and the adapter as well. Do so or you'll get some error

Thanks a lot, I'll give it a try :)

Weird I tested it and I got your desired result you posted before, I got:

First record
Thesis Advisor(s): Borer, Douglas A. ; Second Reader: Chatterjee, Anshu.

Second record
Thesis Advisor(s): Olsen, Richard C. ; Second Reader: Trask, David M.

Maybe you're not outputting the Console.WriteLine(data.Value). That will execute in your test xml twice and will get two records printed but it wouldn't matter how many records you have in the xml. the .Skip(0).First returns the datafield you wish for each record but you have to use it for every record in the xml, that's why the console.writeLine is inside the foreach, I'm looping each record in the xml and getting the desired datafield. Instead of the writeLine you could add a MessageBox to show you each datafield found, I'm guessing you might have ommited it and tried to display the data outside the foreach which will have only 1 record at the end of the loop. Keep me posted 'cause I did a test and got your desired output

Ok here you go. First we get the XElements of the records, and loop through them to select the tag with attribute == 500. This should display in your test xml both records:
<pre>

var records = (from datafields in xd.Descendants("record") select datafields);
foreach (XElement e in records)
{
var data = (from datafield in e.Descendants("datafield")
where (datafield.Attribute("tag").Value == "500")
select datafield).Skip(0).First();
Console.WriteLine(data.Value);
}

</pre>

SOrry if it's in c# but it shouldn't be a problem to translate to VB, just a few tweaks :) Hope this helps

OK I can see a problem here... You are adding the data from the reader dinamycally and when I set the valueMember property is usually when I bind to a dataSource. Maybe it would be a good Idea to assign the datasource of the combo to the reader instead of filling it dynamically and after adding the datasource and assigning the valueMember, you can loop through the items of the list to change the text displayed in the combo to your format

Thanks for the answer, it was sort of what I already did, now all that's left is do some real testing, I've done some dummy testing and it's all good but I hope it works the same with the other guys' way. Thanks a lot

thanks, it was my first :/