Yesterday I decided to modify a utlity I wrote to assist with copying Banner permissions from one user to another.  I decided to add a list of the actual classes and objects that the destination user would receive as a result of the copy.   This was a fairly easy modification, but as usual, I found myself spending most of my time on the easiest part of the project.  

I naively assumed that C# would have some automagic way of display columns.  While there may be a more official way to do it, nothing seemed to fit my scenario perfectly.   

The average user has between 15 and 30 classes, but some have much more.  I wanted to shorten the length, page wise, of the output.  This was for purpose of readability.  As I’m looping through a query result, my initial code looked something like this:

while (reader.Read())
{
    Console.WriteLine(reader[0].ToString());
}

I spent a good amount of time trying to use String.Format and things like it to try to turn this one column of output into two columns. The result? No success. Finally, I realized I was spending all my time trying to come up with the proper way to do something when there was most likely an easy, functional way to do this. I finally arrived at the following code:

int n = 0;
while (reader.Read())
{
    if (n % 2 == 0)
    {
        Console.Write(reader[0].ToString().PadRight(30));
    }
    else
    {
        Console.WriteLine(reader[0].ToString().PadRight(30));
    }                    
    n++;                        
}

The counter allows us to do an “every other time” operation by relying on whether or not the number is even or odd. Console.Write, as you should know, doesn’t append a return carriage, Console.WriteLine does.

PadRight(30) simply ensures that the output for each is a constant length. This prevents the “columns” from being misaligned.

There may be other, better ways to accomplish this. (And I welcome you to share them!) If you are dealing with a large amount of data and numerous columns, this is probably NOT the best approach. But if you’re looking for a functional, easy to implement means to an end, this may assist you.