I don’t know about you, but I can’t count anymore the number of times I’ve seen this code pattern (in code snippets online as well as in production code):
while not ADataSet.Eof do
begin
[...]
ADataSet.FieldByName('MyFieldName1').SomePropertyOrMethod;
ADataSet.FieldByName('MyFieldName2').SomePropertyOrMethod;
[...]
ADataSet.Next;
end;
Using FieldByName in a case like this is certainly very convenient and has a lot of advantages:
But is has a major problem:
It does not seem that bad if it is just an example or some demo code, but as soon as it is published, someone will grab a snippet and a few copy’n'haste later it ends up in production code.
And indeed, I can tell you that this (untold) company’s production code actually contained dozens of cases like the following (anonymized but real) code:
aQuery.ParamByName('Zone_mask').DataType := ftLargeint;
aQuery.ParamByName('Zone_mask').Value := aZoneMask;
aQuery.ParamByName('Start_date').AsDateTime := fStartDate;
aQuery.ParamByName('End_date').AsDateTime := fEndDate;
aQuery.Open;
while not aQuery.EOF do
begin
effectiveDeviceInfo :=
TEffectiveDeviceInfo.Create(
aQuery.FieldByName('Device_code_name').Value,
aQuery.FieldByName('Device_descr').Value,
aQuery.FieldByName('Toggle_times').Value,
aQuery.FieldByName('Comments').Value,
aQuery.FieldByName('Effective_start_date').Value,
aQuery.FieldByName('Effective_end_date').Value);
fChannelDevice.AddObject(
self.MakeSortKey(
aQuery.FieldByName('Device_code_id').Value,
aQuery.FieldByName('Channel_int').Value),
effectiveDeviceInfo);
aQuery.Next;
end;
aQuery.Close;
That’s between 8 and 24 added loops for each record in this dataset which could have tens of thousands of records!
Granted, that would be small loops if the number of fields is reasonable, but still…
So, I cringe when I see someone posting on StackOverflow a code snippet that looks good (verify Active, DisableControls, try..finally) but has the FieldByName inside the loop:
begin
Assert(AdoQuery1.Active, 'Dataset is not active!');
try
AdoQuery1.DisableControls;
AdoQuery1.First;
while not AdoQuery1.Eof do
begin
AdoQuery1.Edit;
AdoQuery1.FieldByName('MyFieldName').Value := Edit1.Text;
AdoQuery1.Post;
AdoQuery1.Next;
end;
finally
AdoQuery1.EnableControls;
end;
end;
And kudos to the poster who changed it after just a little nudge to create a local Field variable before the loop. It adds 2 more lines per Field, but the code is much better:
var
AField : TField; // <= line added
begin
Assert(AdoQuery1.Active, 'Dataset is not active!');
try
AdoQuery1.DisableControls;
AField := AdoQuery1.FieldByName('MyFieldName'); // <= line added
AdoQuery1.First;
while not AdoQuery1.Eof do
begin
AdoQuery1.Edit;
AField.Value := Edit1.Text;
AdoQuery1.Post;
AdoQuery1.Next;
end;
finally
AdoQuery1.EnableControls;
end;
end;
Now, don’t go “premature optimization” on me, as the cases where the number of records is too small to benefit from ousting the FieldByName from the DataSet loop are pretty rare.
I would be curious to know what you get if you do a grep in your code base to find FieldByName or FindField in loops…
Do you have any?
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