Luke Smith

Since moving from university to the ‘real’ world of development I’ve been creating
alot of helper classes to try and cut down on the number of LOC I have to write. One
thing which bugged me for a while was Query Strings in ASP.NET - checking whether
a string existed and then getting that strings value. Sounds simple but then what
if you’re expecting it to be an integer or a double, or a DateTime or something else?
You have to go through the checking then the converting to the type you want.

So instead of

string querystring = Request.QueryString["myinteger"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(querystring))
{ int output; if (int.TryParse(querystring, out output)
{ // the
querystring was actually an integer  }
}

>

I wrote a helper class that will return a nullable
type of the QueryString value giving cleaner code in the page and reducing the
chances of not catching exceptions, as you can never be 100% the querystring you expect
to be an integer will be an integer

int? output = PageHelper.GetQueryInt("myinteger"); if (output.HasValue)
{ // output
is an integer }

>

I am finishing off a code viewer for my website, so i will soon be making the PageHelper
and other helper classes available.