Why can't I do foreach (var Item in DataTable.Rows)?

c# .net datatable foreach datarow
GateKiller picture GateKiller · Feb 24, 2010 · Viewed 10.8k times · Source

Is there a reason why I can't do the following:

foreach (var Item in DataTable.Rows) {

rather than having to do

foreach (DataRow Item in DataTable.Rows) {

I would have thought this was possible, like it is on other datatypes. For example:

foreach (var Employee in Staff) { // string[] Staff etc...

When I try the first foreach loop, I get the the error CS0021: Cannot apply indexing with [] to an expression of type 'object'.

Why can't the compiler figure out that .Rows returns a collections of DataRows?

Answer

Brian Rasmussen picture Brian Rasmussen · Feb 24, 2010

Rows effectively returns IEnumerable (DataRowCollection), so the compiler can only pick object as the type for var. Use Rows.Cast<DataRow> if you want to use var.

Cast is defined on Enumerable, so you have to include System.Linq.

Related questions

LINQ query on a DataTable

I'm trying to perform a LINQ query on a DataTable object and bizarrely I am finding that performing such queries on DataTables is not straightforward. For example: var results = from myRow in myDataTable where results.Field("RowNo") == 1 select results; This …

Read More
How to read a CSV file into a .NET Datatable

How can I load a CSV file into a System.Data.DataTable, creating the datatable based on the CSV file? Does the regular ADO.net functionality allow this?

Read More
Read SQL Table into C# DataTable

I've read a lot of posts about inserting a DataTable into a SQL table, but is there an easy way to pull a SQL table into a .NET DataTable?

Read More