The Numeric Provider Specific Types support implicit and explicit conversions to and from several .Net data types. When a conversion is done implicitly a cast does not have to be specified and the conversion will always succeed. For example, going from an Int16 to a TdDecimal is considered an implicit cast. An explicit conversion requires a cast to be specified and it is possible that the conversion may fail. Converting a TdNumber to an Int32 is an explicit conversion.

In addition, System.IConvertible has also been implemented for each Numeric Provider Specific Type. This will enable the conversion methods from the System.Convert class to be called to convert Provider Specific Type to another System data type.

TdDecimal and TdNumber have a higher precision when compared to .Net data types. Therefore, when a conversion is performed to a Sytem type the conversion may cause an overflow, precision may be lost, or truncation may occur. In cases where the Provider Specific Type cannot be converted because of an overflow, an OverflowException will be thrown.

The following charts indicates the type of conversion that needs to be performed when converting either from or to a .Net data type:

The following example shows when numbers represented as a TdDecimal will be truncated after being converted to System.Decimal:

Parsing Numeric Strings

In order to convert a numeric string to a Numeric Provider Specific Type the Parse method must be called. An exception will be thrown if the any of the following occurs:

• OverflowException will be thrown if the precision of the numeric string is greater than 38.
• FormatException will be thrown if the numeric string cannot be successfully parsed.

Currently, the parse method does not support all of the cultural formatting properties. Supported culture specific formatting properties are as follows:

• Negative Sign
• Positive Sign
• Number Group Separator
• Number Decimal Separator

Please refer to the Culture Specific Formatting section for more information.

String Conversion

To convert a Numeric Provider Specific Type to a numeric String, the method TdDecimal.ToString is called.  This method can convert the number into a numeric string that is in a culture specific format. Refer to Culture Specific Formatting for more information.

Example

The following is an example of converting a TdDecimal to/from different system types.

public void Conversion() 
{ 
    String numericValue = "12897.34209845";
   
    // Going to convert numeric string to a TdDecimal
    TdDecimal stringToTdDecimal = TdDecimal.Parse(numericString);
   
    // Going to implicitly convert an Int32 to a TdDecimal
    Int32 valueInt32 = 98087473;
    TdDecimal int32ToTdDecimal = valueInt32;
   
    // A Double needs to be converted explicitly
    Double valueDouble = 1.342332E20;
    TdDecimal doubleToTdDecimal = (TdDecimal)valueDouble;
   
    // There are several ways to convert a TdDecimal to another type
    //    Explicitly
    //    Conversion Method
    //    Convert method
    // Number = 5556558260396752.3392642858199218667
    // When converting to Int64, the fractional part of number will be truncated.
    TdDecimal value = new TdDecimal(0x393AF9EB, 0x12137D63, 0x40AF3739, 0x000AB398, 35, 19);
    Int64 int64Temp1 = (Int64)value;
    Int64 int64Temp2 = TdDecimal.ToInt64(value);
    Int64 int64Temp3 = System.Convert.ToInt64((Object)value);
   
    // Going to convert a TdDecimal to a String
    //     tempTdDecimal = 3248765.213857463 (precision = 16, scale = 9)
    TdDecimal tempTdDecimal =
         new TdDecimal(0x1887D6B7, 0x000B8ABC, 0, 0, 16, 9);
    String resultStr1 = tempTdDecimal.ToString();
    String resultStr2 = tempTdDecimal.ToString("f20");
    String resultStr3 = tempTdDecimal.ToString("e5");
    String resultStr4 = tempTdDecimal.ToString("E10");
    String resultStr5 = tempTdDecimal.ToString("C2");
   
    // The results for the conversions will be
    //    resultStr1     "3248765.213857463"
    //    resultStr2     "3248765.21385746300000000000"
    //    resultStr3     "3.24877e+006"
    //    resultStr4     "3.2487652139E+006"
    //    resultStr5     "$3,248,765.21"
   
    
}