Azure Tips and Tricks Part 84 - Reading an item from an Azure Storage Table

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Intro

Most folks aren’t aware of how powerful the Azure platform really is. As I’ve been presenting topics on Azure, I’ve had many people say, “How did you do that?” So I’ll be documenting my tips and tricks for Azure in these posts.

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Adding an item to a Azure Storage Table

In case you are new to the Azure Storage Tables, we’ve reviewed the following items this week:

• Creating your first Azure Storage Table
• Adding an item to a Azure Storage Table
• Today - Reading an item from a Azure Storage Table
• Updating an item from a Azure Storage Table

Today, we’ll be taking a look at reading an item through code that we previously placed into an Azure Storage Table.

Getting Started

Open the C# Console application that we were working with yesterday and let’s add two methods to:

• Return all messages in a table
• Lookup a message based off of the RowKey and PartitionKey

Return all messages in a table

In our Program.cs file, we’ll now add in a helper method to return all messages in a given table.

        static void GetAllMessages(CloudTable table)
        {
            TableQuery<Thanks> query = new TableQuery<Thanks>()
                    .Where(TableQuery.GenerateFilterCondition("PartitionKey", QueryComparisons.Equal, "ThanksApp"));

            Console.WriteLine("GetAllMessages begin");
            foreach (Thanks message in table.ExecuteQuery(query))
            {
                Console.WriteLine(message.Name);
                Console.WriteLine(message.Date);
            }
            Console.WriteLine("GetAllMessages ends");
        }

In this example, we’ll pass in the given table name and passed on the PartitionKey it will return all messsages. In this example, we hardcoded the value to be “ThanksApp”.

Lookup a message based off of the RowKey and PartitionKey

Again in our Program.cs file, we’ll now add another helper method to return a message based off of the RowKey and PartitionKey that we supply.

static void GetMessage(CloudTable table, string partitionKey, string rowKey)
{
    TableOperation retrieve = TableOperation.Retrieve<Thanks>(partitionKey, rowKey);

    TableResult result = table.Execute(retrieve);

    Console.WriteLine(((Thanks)result.Result).Date);
}

In this example, we’ll pass in the table name, a partition key and a row key to return a message.

Putting it all together

The Main method inside of the Program.cs file just needs to call the methods as shown below:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(
                    CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("StorageConnection"));

    CloudTableClient tableClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudTableClient();

    CloudTable table = tableClient.GetTableReference("thankfulfor");

    table.CreateIfNotExists();

//added this line
    GetMessage(table, "ThanksApp", "I'm thankful for the time with my family");
    GetAllMessages(table);
//added this line
    Console.ReadKey();

}

If we run the program now, then it will display all messages along with the date for the message that we passed in. As described yesterday, you can use the Azure Storage Explorer if you don’t need access to the table through code. If you come back tomorrow, then I’ll show you how to update this item through code.

Want more Azure Tips and Tricks?

If you’d like to learn more Azure Tips and Tricks, then follow me on twitter or stay tuned to this blog! I’d also love to hear your tips and tricks for working in Azure, just leave a comment below.