Creating an Azure Table using CloudTableClient.CreateTableIfNotExist

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 a context class [Step 2] in the last post. He helped me with the link for the best practice on MSDN

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

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

Add References

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

System.Data.Service.Client



And Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Serviceruntime.dll


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



If you notice in the 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 the connection string 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;
using WPFTileGame; 

namespace ConsoleApplication7

{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            CloudStorageAccount account = CloudStorageAccount.Parse("connectionString");
            CloudTableClienttableClient = new CloudTableClient(account.TableEndpoint.ToString(),account.Credentials);
            stringtableName = "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 static object tableName { get; set; }

        public static string stringtableName { get; set; }
        public static CloudTableClient CloudTableClienttableClient { get; set; }}
        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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