Dhananjay Kumar

I discussed Three simple steps to create Azure table in my last post. Just after submitting the post, I got a comment from Neil Mackenzie that I can avoid creation of context class [Step 2] in last post. He helped me with the link for the best practice on MSDN

This post is to accommodate suggestion given by him and recommendation given on MSDN.

In this post we will see how to create Azure table using CloudTableClient.CreatTableIfNotExist method.

Add References

If you are creating table from a console application then you need to add below references to your project,

System.Data.Service.Client

And Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Serviceruntime.dll

Create Entity class

To represent entity class, we need to create a class inheriting from class TableServiceEntity. SchoolEntity class will be as below,

If you notice in above code snippet there is no

1. Row Key
2. Partition Key
3. Calling base class constructor [ As I discussed here ]

Now when you make object of SchoolEntity class, in intellisense you will get RowKey,PartitionKey and TimeStamp to set as below,

Creating Account object

Pass connection string as of your storage account.

Creating Table Client

Creating Table

Creating Table Context

Creating Object to Insert

Adding Object to table

Putting all the code together,

using System;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient;

namespace ConsoleApplication7
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
CloudStorageAccount account = CloudStorageAccount.Parse("connectionString");
CloudTableClient tableClient = new CloudTableClient(
account.TableEndpoint.ToString(),
account.Credentials);
string tableName = "School";
tableClient.CreateTableIfNotExist(tableName);

TableServiceContext  context = tableClient.GetDataServiceContext();

SchoolEntity entity = new SchoolEntity
{
Age = 9,
Name = "DJ",
PartitionKey = "S",
RollNumber  = null ,
RowKey = Guid.NewGuid().ToString()
};
context.AddObject(tableName, entity);
context.SaveChanges();

Console.WriteLine("Saved");
Console.ReadKey(true);


}
}

public class SchoolEntity : TableServiceEntity
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public int ? RollNumber { get; set; }
public int Age { get; set; }
}

}

In this way you can create a table. I hope this post was useful. Thanks for reading

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