Serialize EF Tables to String NuGet Package

Takes an Entity Framework DBContext and Serialises the contents of all the tables specified in the List of strings to a string.



The utility Class can be used as follows:

string parameterString= $"Customers," + // Outputs all columns for all records in the Customer Table
$"Customers[]" + // same as above
$"Orders[OrderId;OrderQuantity]" + // outputs only the OrderId and
// OrderQuantity from all records in the Orders table
$"Payments[!PaymentId;Date]"; // Outputs columns EXCEPT PaymentId and Date from the Payments Table



SomeDbContext context = new SomeDbContext();
Formatter formatter = new Formatter();
String formattedOutputString = formatter.FormatEntities(context, parameterString);

The output string will have newline delimited lines as follows:

Customers
| CustomerId | Name | DateOfBirth |
| 1 | Jon Doe | 1982-03-12 |
| 2 | Eric Hand | 1966-04-15 |

Customers[]
| CustomerId | Name | DateOfBirth |
| 1 | Jon Doe | 1982-03-12 |
| 2 | Eric Hand | 1966-04-15 |

Orders[OrderId;OrderQuantity]
| OrderId | Quantity |
| 456 | 78 |
| 6578 | 65 |


Payments[!PaymentId;Date]
| PaymentAmount |
| 23.56 |
| 45.89 |

This last example assumes there were three columns ion the table two of which were excluded.

Note these are TABLE names not the Entity names as DbContext.Database.SqlQuery is used.