Out parameter

[sridharvenkataramanan]

Hi,
I am recently using Fxcop , and in my application i used out parameter in a situation as described below. but Fxcop shows the message as
"Using out parameters might indicate a design flaw."

I have a method which returns the result set of database query as dictionary. I need to display the headings / [ the field selections used in the query for display purpose from the front end. so i used out put paramter to display the headings/selected fields of the query and dictionary to hold the records from database.

public Dictionary<int, LogHeader> FetchErrorLog(out ReadOnlyCollection<string> readOnlyColNames)
        {

            Dictionary<int, LogHeader> dicHeader = new Dictionary<int, LogHeader>();

  ..................

            List<string> colNames = new List<string>();
            
            colNames = new List<string>();
            colNames.Add("ErrorType");
            colNames.Add("Description");
            colNames.Add("Computer");
            colNames.Add("Created");

            readOnlyColNames = new ReadOnlyCollection<string>(colNames);

}

Let me know what is the other way to return the headings of the query as well the resultant records .

[tlhintoq]

I think what you did is fine. But if you really want to get rid of the out param you could make a new class with two properties: headings list, dictionary.

Then return a new instance of the class with your fetched objects.