I know this blog is not about Microsoft Azure which I usually do. There are a lot of Tips that are in my mind and I want to just share them to free my mind because I haven’t shared them with anyone.

This Tip is a basic tip but it doesn’t have any straight forward accepted answer in google. So I thought I should share this Tip how to resolve this if you get stuck with this basic problem.

Problem Statement: We have to generate a Report to the CSV file but there are some columns in Db table which has records with leading zero and are long as shown below:

So when I generate the CSV report, I get the records in CSV in below format.

You can see that my BarcodeNo Column is displaying in E(scientific notation) and leading 0s are missing in the CSV file.

Solution:
In order to solve this problem, we will use the char function SQL server, this function converts an int ASCII code to a character value.
Char(9) denotes to Tab.

Let us try to implement the same in our SQL query or Stored procedure in your application.

I am just using simple SQL query to get the result in this demo to simplify things and be focused toward a solution rather than implementation:

using LeadingZeros.Helper;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;

namespace LeadingZeros.Persistence
{
    public class BarcodeRepository
    {
        private QueryInfo _query;
        public BarcodeRepository()
        {
            _query = new QueryInfo();
        }
        public DataTable GetBarcodeData()
        {
            DataTable table = new DataTable();
            SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(_query.GetSourceConnectionString());
            connection.Open();
            SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("Select SeqID,UsageCode,char(9)+BarcodeNo as BarcodeNo from Garments", connection);
            SqlDataAdapter adapt = new SqlDataAdapter(cmd);
            adapt.Fill(table);
            connection.Close();
            return table;
        }
    }
}

Now if I try to regenerate the report again I will get the records in a proper format and will get the leading Zero no more scientific notation in CSV file.

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Happy Learning!