Close reader before closing connection

Question

Should you always close a DataReader before closing the connection, or is it okay to just close the connection? By just closing the connection does that effectively close the reader?

(This is for c#.net 3.5)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Aside from making your intent clear, there is this from the Microsoft documentation (Retrieving Data Using a DataReader (ADO.NET)):

You should always call the Close method when you have finished using the DataReader object.

Answer 2

Close the DataReader as well.

imo. if it implements IDisposable , or has a .close() method or a similar construct that the documentation states you should call when you're done with this instance - do it. Don't rely on something else to take care of it for you - unless the documentation explicitly states that it does. For a DataReader/DbConnection - the docs doesn't mention anything like this.

Answer 3

I prefer to leverage the c# using statment which will call dispose() for you. Here is a decent explanation.

Using Statment