Get datatype from values passed as string

Question

I am writing a framework that will connect to many different data source types and return values from these sources. The easy ones are SQL, Access and Oracle. The tougher ones a

Answer 1

Would it be easier to store it in a generic datatype with .ToInt16(), .ToInt32(), .ToBool(), etc.? If you write an app expecting int and it gets boolean it will fail, so it would be better to let the programmer explicit convert to the expected datatype.

The problem with your approach is that you don't know if a row containing 0 as the first item will contain -100000 as item number 100. This means you can't do a successfull conversion until all rows has been TryParsed by all the different datatypes. Very expensive operation!

If anything I'd use precompiled regular expressions and/or custom logic to process the data. For instance iterating all rows to find highest/lowest number, occurence of string, etc.