Solve real coding problems
Let’s say you want to parse a comma-separated string into a list of integers. For example, you have “1,2,3” and you want to parse it into [1,2,3]. This is different from parsing CSV with rows of comma-separated values. This is more straightforward. You can use string.Split(“,”) to get the individual values and then convert them … Read more
When your CSV header names don’t match your property names exactly, CsvHelper will throw an exception. For example, if your header name is “title” and your property name is “Title”, it’ll throw an exception like: HeaderValidationException: Header with name ‘Title'[0] was not found. If you don’t want to (or can’t) change the names to match, … Read more
You can use the Validator utility class to do manual attribute-based validation on any object, in any project type (as opposed to doing automatic model validation in ASP.NET). To do this, add model validation attributes to your class properties, then create an object and populate it (aka binding), and finally execute manual validation with the … Read more
In this article, I’ll show how to configure CsvHelper to map CSV fields to the right properties when there’s no header row. At the end, I’ll show the alternative approach of manually parsing in this scenario. Consider the following CSV data without a header row: Normally, CsvHelper maps fields to properties by matching column names … Read more
When you use ConfigurationSection.Get() to load an object from appsettings.json, it returns null if the section doesn’t exist. Since you’re probably not expecting this to be null, this can lead to problems surfacing in unexpected places, such as getting a NullReferenceException: Note: If you’re using ASP.NET Core, you’ll be referring to the config via builder.Configuration … Read more
In this article, I’ll show how to parse a CSV file manually and with a parser library (CsvHelper). Let’s say you have the following CSV file: To manually parse this, split each line with a comma and process the fields in the resulting string[] however you want. If there’s a header row, skip it (headers … Read more
Action filters can be added globally, per-controller, and for specific actions. When you add filters globally or per-controller, it applies the filter to multiple actions. This is convenient, but what if you want to add the filter for *most* actions, but not all of them? One way to do that is by disabling the filter … Read more
Let’s say you have the following JSON: When you go to deserialize it, you notice that all or some of its properties are null (or default for value types): This outputs the following (because person.Name is null and person.Pets is 0): The data is definitely there, so why did it set these properties to null … Read more
If you’re trying to use ConfigurationBuilder to read appsettings.json, you probably have the following code snippet and are running into compiler errors: This has three different errors, but the compiler only shows you one error at a time. This is due to the way this is designed – ConfigurationBuilder is in one library and its … Read more
Deconstructing an object means assigning its properties to several variables with a one-liner using deconstruction assignment syntax (also referred to as destructuring or unpacking). To be able to deconstruct an object, it needs to have a Deconstruct() method. Some built-in types have this – tuples, dictionary key/value pairs, records – and you can add it … Read more
