> I would like to know what may be the "Best" way to approach with
> problem.
>
> I have an application that I created to transfers data dynamically from
> an unknown source (ie maybe Excel, Access, XML, or SQLServer) and
> imports it into a datatable and then on to the dataGridView for the
> user to see. The thing about that initial datasource is that the
> application will not know how its columns are formatted up until the
> data is actually sent through. By this I mean that the number of
> columns and the column name will vary. This data will comprise of a
> user's product library.
>
> There is another process that kicks in around this time that allows the
> user to search through thier file server to create an archive of all
> the file names that lie within. This data is held in memory only at
> this point through another dataTable.
>
> The final step of this process in where I'm having a problem. I would
> like to be able to compare the file names gathered from the file server
> (UPC#'s)into the dataTable with the product library that is held within
> the other datatable.
>
> I wanted to be able to do all of this within the system's memory and
> the dataTables instead of persisting those tables out to a database
> just to do an unmatched query on the data. Needless to say, I couldn't
> figure out how to do this. I don't think that its possible. So now that
> I have to persist the data out, I'm wondering what would be the best
> way to do this. I didn't want to nessasarily do it within SQL Server
> (unless thats the best way) because I don't want to assume that all my
> users will know how to install and setup SQL Server. I didn't know if I
> could do this with Access because they may not have Access on thier
> system (Though I think it doesn't matter). I was curious about doing it
> in XML but don't know how difficult it would be to query the data
> against each other afterwards.
>
> The thing about this is that the user will not need to keep the data
> within the file that I create because they will import the final
> results into their current data structure afterwards. The other problem
> is dynamically naming all the columns once the system is able to
> determine what data the user is sending to them.
>
> Thank you for your help.