Streamwriter and Streamreader - c#-4.0

Question

I have my uni assignment and it's only very basic coding but I have to do
A user shall be able to store records to a file. On start-up a user shall be able to select a file of records and load these into the program.
I am having trouble with this as it will save but once I close the program and re-open it they are gone, any ones help is appreciated.
This is what I have so far:
private void Save_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
SaveToFile(records, file);
}
private void SaveToFile(List<Client> records, string file)
{
//File.WriteAllText(file, String.Empty);
StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(file);
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(file);
try
{
AddMember();
for (int i = 0; i < records.Count; i++)
{
writer.WriteLine(records[i].WriteToFile());
}
writer.Close();
}
catch (IOException z)
{
MessageBox.Show("Error" + z);
}
}

Answer 1

Before closing the StreamWriter you should call Flush() method. Flush() Clears all buffers for the current writer and causes any buffered data to be written to the underlying stream.

Answer 2

reader.clos();
you forgot this

Answer 3

This is just a guess, but it sounds like you might be overwriting the file when you start the program.
In your SaveToFile method, you have the following two lines at the start:
StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(file);
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(file);
The first one will create a new file with the name in file. The second one isn't needed if you're not doing any reading from the file.
Now, if you have a similar block of code in somewhere else in your program that is executed before the SaveToFile method is called, it will overwrite the file (and since you most likely don't write anything in that earlier part of the code, you're left with a blank file).
To prevent this, there are two suggestions I'll offer:
Only create a StreamWriter when you are going to be writing to the file. Any other times you create a StreamWriter, you will be overwriting the existing file.
If you don't want to overwrite the file, you can use the overload of the constructor that takes a second parameter (a boolean) to indicate whether or not to append new data to the file:
StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(file, true);
Additionally, I'd suggest getting to know and use using blocks, as this will take care of closing and flushing the StreamWriter (and its underlying stream) for you, even if an exception occurs and is unhandled:
private void SaveToFile(List<Client> records, string file)
{
try
{
AddMember();
// If you don't want to append but overwrite, use:
// using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(file))
using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(file, append))
{
for (int i = 0; i < records.Count; i++)
{
writer.WriteLine(records[i].WriteToFile());
}
}
}
catch (IOException z)
{
MessageBox.Show("Error" + z);
}
}