Creating a QueryString utility Class

Building up query strings is quite a common task in web development but there is currently no utility class in .Net that neatly facilitates this. So I thought I’d have a go at creating one that nicely encapsulates the build process and makes use of Generic Collections. And here is what I came up with!

public class QueryString
{
    private Dictionary _Params = new Dictionary();

    public overide ToString()
    {
        List returnParams = new List();

        foreach (KeyValuePair param in _Params)
        {
            returnParams.Add(String.Format("{0}={1}", param.Key, param.Value));
        }

        return "?" + String.Join("&", returnParams.ToArray());
    }

    public void Add(string key, string value)
    {
        _Params.Add(key, HttpUtility.UrlEncode(value));
    }
}

This can be used like so

QueryString query = new QueryString();

query.Add("param1", "value1");
query.Add("param2", "value2");

return query.ToString();

Filed under: Code