I'm looking for a little "magic"
We have multiple applications written using entity framework. We need to update the scheme of a couple of columns - basically increasing the size of some account numbers columns. In our situation, we host the application for other customers and do not wish to increase the size of their account numbers but would like to have a single entity framework implementation for both.
The logic is the same with both tables - only the field length changes. This is a very large code base and refactoring, rewriting etc. the ideal solution.
Is there a way to specify in a config file what the field length is so it can be built at runtime?
Application
Table
Customer Name (256)
Account NUmber (10)
Same Application
Table
Customer Name (256)
Account Number (18)
You can write your own custom validation attribute with EF like in these examples: Custom validation attribute that compares the value of my property with another property's value in my model class
Pass variable data to ValidationAttribute
You can read your CustomerName property value, and based on the data you can validate your AccountNumber property. And in this custom validator you can read your config file.
Related
I want to know the best way of avoiding entity duplication in an ASP.NET Core Web API project.
Imagine that you have a product with a name and manufacturer and you want to make sure if the name is not duplicated. Imagine that a new product with a name came from client (dto) and we need to look if the name (entity) already exists in the database (using EF).
You need to trim the name (name.trim()) for both names from entity and dto
You need to remove all the whitespaces in between (string.replace(" ", string.empty())
You need to change everything to lower case (string.lower())
Finally you need to compare these two
Is there any best practices how to do this without writing all the code? I tried to use string.compare with the compareoptions like ignorecase and ignoresymbols and also the string.equal() with ignorecase option but the EF gives me an alarm that it can not translate the code.
br
I have a suggestion for your approach.
Introduce another column (This can be a primary key with other keys) and save the name with trimming and lowercase when you insert a new record to that table.
Example:
Original Name : Amir Masoud Babaei -->
New Column value: amirmasoudbabaei
And when you insert a new record, do your trimming and lowercase changes and save it to the database. Since it is a primary key, it should throw an error.
So with this approach, you don't need to loop through all the names and validate if the name is already exist.
Is it possible to reference additional columns apart from the 'Code' and 'Name' columns when using a domain attribute in an entity?
E.g. A person entity has a code of '1' and a name of 'Smith' and a Gender of 'Male'
In a customer entity there is a domain value referencing the person entity which displays the following 1 {Smith}. The users would like an additional read only attribute which would copy the Gender value of 'Male' into the customer entity based on the domain value. Can this be done using out of the box MDS UI?
I know this is duplicate data and breaks normal form but for usability this would be useful. It would be the equivalent of referencing additional columns in an MS Access drop down list.
Many thanks in advance for any help
This is not possible with the standard UI. One option would be to develop a custom UI where you can handle these kind of requests.
If you want to stick with the standard product I can see a workaround but this is a bit of a "dirty" one.
You can misuse (abuse) the Name attribute of the Person entity by adding a business rule to the Person entity that generates the content of the Name attribute as a concatenation of multiple attributes. You of course need an additional attribute that serves as a place holder for the original Name. The concatenated field will then show in your customer entity.
One question that does come to mind is why a user would like/need to see the gender of a person in a customer list? As you have a separate Person entity I expect you to have multiple persons per customers. What would the gender of one person - even if it is the main contact - matter?
I am making a ZF2 app. I am using entities, mappers and services (e.g. UserEntity, UserMapper, UserService) to manage the objects/models. Properties in the entities are CamalCased (e.g. FirstName, LastName) while in the database, fields are using underscore (first_name, last_name). I will plan to use a hydrator to map the properties and db-fields when retrieving or saving. The service object (UserService) will be used to communicate with the mapper to retrieve and save data models using the mapper. The hydrator will convert the result of mapper and convert them into proper entities.
The thing I am confused is that when the service (UserService) need to provide some cirteria - for example to find all users with a specific 'last name', will the service use the database field names (last_name) or entity properties name (LastName)?
If the db field name is used in the Service, so any change in the db structure will require me to update the service also, which completely fails the reason of using the whole approach.
If you take a look at the ClassMethods:hydrate method (https://github.com/zendframework/zf2/blob/master/library/Zend/Stdlib/Hydrator/ClassMethods.php) you will see that it just copies the properties from one object to another. You have the option of converting the property names to/from camelCase but that's it.
If you change a column name in your database then you will need to change corresponding property name in your object. And vice versa. Which I believe is the crux of your question?
If you want to make table column names be independent of your method names then you need something that lets you define an actual mapping table somewhere. Change a column or method name and you only need to update the configuration mapping table.
Not a ZF2 expert so I could be wrong but it doesn't look like any of the supplied hydrators support this.
I do know that Doctrine 2 supports it.
I'm working on a custom entity framework provider and I need to add support for default column values for this provider. When the user uses the entity framework wizard and selects a table that includes columns with default values, those default values are not being populated into the entity designer.
I'm a little lost on where exactly this population should take place. I believe the appropriate place would be in the GetEdmType method override of DbXmlEnabledProviderManifest but I just don't see how to set the default value, if this is the correct place.
Anybody has experience writing EF providers that support default values for table columns? How do you implement this?
I am a bit late to the party but DbXmlEnabledProviderManifest is not the right place for adding default values. The provider manifest describes capabilities of the database engine itself and is specific (and general) to this database engine and not to a given database and/or table. The default value in the provider manifest tells EF what value to use for the given column property if one is not provided by the user (e.g. if the user user does not specify scale or precision for a decimal column the value from provider manifest will be used for scale and/or precision used for this column).
If you want just to insert a default value for a property the easiest way is to set the property that corresponds to the column on your entity to this value in the constructor. This way the user can always set it to a different value but if s/he does not the default value will be sent to the database. For some corner case scenarios where some of the columns in the database do not have corresponding properties on entities you can use DefaultValue attribute on the Property element in SSDL which will be inserted to the database when you add a row. This is especially useful if those properties are not nullable since without telling EF what value should be inserted EF would try inserting null which would obviously fail for non-nullable columns.
I want to use a Money value object in my application. I have found several examples of a Money datatype. But I can't figure out how to use them with EF4. I would like to store each amount as a Decimal/CurrencyCode pair (where currencycode is a string - "USD", "SEK", etc) in the database. I tried creating a complexType but I couldn't get that to work. Is this possible?
It should be definitely possible. Your complex type is just pair of decimal and string property. It is exactly what complex type are used for. Depending on your approach you must do:
Database first:
You will define your database first. Your table will contain money and varchar columns representing your new type. When you update your EDMX model from database it will include it as scalar properties to your entity. You must remove those properties. Then go to model browser and create new complex type. Return back to entity and add complex property of your new complex type. And at the end you must go to entity mapping and map your complex type to those database columns.
Here is basic tutorial from MSDN but from unknown reason they didn't include such elementary details like screenshots. Here is some video from channel9.
Model first:
This is similar to database first but you don't have to deal with database creation and mapping. It will be generated for you.
Code first (EF 4.1):
You must create separate class for your complex type and use it as property in your entity. You should not need to map it by default - mapping should be infered. If it doesn't work you can map complext type either by using ComplextTypeAttribute annotation or by defining mapping in DbModelBuilder.
I can further extend approach you need to use if you provide more details.