Current Record and Size of Recordset

This section describes how to locate the current position of the cursor in the sample Recordset in JScript Code Example to Return a Recordset.

Current Record

The current record in the dataset corresponds to that pointed by the position of the cursor of the Recordset object. When a Recordset object is returned from the data source as the result of calling Recordset.Open, Command.Execute, or Connection.Execute (including Connection.NamedCommand and Connection.StoredProcedure), the cursor is set to point at the first record. In the sample dataset, the initial current record is the "Uncle Bob's Organic Dried Pears" item.

Size of Recordset

To find out the size of a Recordset object, get the value of the Recordset.RecordCount property. This value is a long integer that indicates the number of records in the Recordset. If the dataset is returned from the OLEDB Provider for Microsoft SQL Server, this value gives the number of rows returned. Reading the RecordCount property on a closed Recordset causes an error.

If the number of records cannot be determined, the value of the property is -1.

The value of the RecordCount property also depends on the capabilities of the provider and the type of cursor used. For a forward-only cursor, the value is -1. For a static or keyset cursor, the value is the actual number of records returned in the Recordset object. For a dynamic cursor, the value is either -1 or the actual number of records, depending on the data source.

A cursor that supports Recordcount must work harder, and therefore requires more computing power, than a cursor does not support Recordcount. If you do not need to know the number of records, using different cursor type might help improve your application's performance, especially if you must deal with a large data set.

In some cases, a provider or cursor is unable to determine the RecordCount value without first fetching all records from the data source. To ensure accurate counting, call the Recordset.MoveLast method before calling Recordset.RecordCount.

The sample Recordset object obtained using the JScript Code Example uses a forward-only cursor, so calling RecordCount on this object always results in -1. If you change the line of code that calls the Recordset.Open method as shown in the following example, the RecordCount property will return the actual number of records fetched.

oRs.Open sSQL, sCnStr, adOpenStatic, adLockOptimistic, adCmdText   

This is because static cursors with the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server support RecordCount. In this example, there are five records and thus RecordCount should yield the value of 5.

This section contains the following topic.

Boundaries of a Recordset