I'm going to start an new application with MVC Web API. Api should communicate with DB. Data base is not yet designed, but this DB will communicate with more then one application. So which way I have to choose.
Code first is a good chooice for you, for the following reasons:
Code first is prefered by programmers
Good support in EF Core
more flexibility
You can use bounded context to communicate with other databases
Other info:
The image is copyied from:
http://www.entityframeworktutorial.net/choosing-development-approach-with-entity-framework.aspx
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we can do CRUD operations using Entity framework but we can also do same CRUD operations using entity framework & Web Api.But why we need to use WEebApi.please give a real time Example..Try to tell answer without using it is light weight or to make restful services..
please differentiate between CRUD operation using entity framework and EF + webApi..what happen when we use one another.
Entity Framework is an object-relational mapper (O/RM) that helps with data access from DB.
It can be used to perform CRUD operations, execute Stored procedures, query views etc.
Web API is similar to web service. It is primarily used to communicate over HTTP which entity framework cannot do. Web API can receive requests over Http and call Data Access Layer (EF) to perform data access operations.
Hope it helps!!!
Entity Framework is an ORM. Assume you build a web application which functions on its own, has a UI and saves stuff to the db. In a simple scenario like this there is no point in trying to complicate things by adding an API into the mix, so your ORM is more than enough.
Now, imagine you have 2 applications, a web one and also a mobile app. They both take data and they both need to save that data to a database.
How do you achieve that without duplicating the work? This is when an API becomes needed.
You build an API, hide the database operations behind it and now both your web app and mobile can talk to one common layer and use the same data. This a very common scenario, if multiple apps need to share the same data.
There are of course other use cases, sometimes an entire business is focusing on providing data to clients and don't want to worry too much about how they're going to do it. They would provide an API, document the standards, secure their API and let clients use it as they need to.
I heard that companies that use Java technologies, they used to build their own custom Framework that wraps Hibernate. However, is it really feasible for their .Net peers to do the same thing with NHibernate or Entity Framework?
This is almost always a horrible idea - I think Ayende sums it up best in this article. In general, you should consider NHibernate itself to be the "wrapper" around your data access - attempting to build an abstraction layer on top of it is probably going to be a losing proposition.
Actually, you should check out some of the articles on .NET Junkie's weblog. He wrote several great posts on how to deal with repositories, queries, commands and so on. We've been using these in a very large enterprise system where we switch between an in-memory dictionary, an in-memory SQLite database and a production environment using SQL Server or Oracle. Obviously, we use NHibernate for this.
I use the repository pattern and a separate project/dll to abstract away the data framework nhibernate / entity framework. this is a good starting point http://codebetter.com/petervanooijen/2008/04/04/wrapping-up-nhibernate-in-repositories/
I really like OData (WCF Data Services). In past projects I have coded up so many Web-Services just to allow different ways to read my data.
OData gives great flexibility for the clients to have the data as they need it.
However, in a discussion today, a co-worker pointed out that how we are doing OData is little more than giving the client application a connection to the database.
Here is how we are setting up our WCF Data Service (Note: this is the traditional way)
Create an Entity Framework (E)F Data Model of our database
Publish that model with WCF Data Services
Add Security to the OData feed
(This is where it is better than a direct connection to the SQL Server)
My co-worker (correctly) pointed out that all our clients will be coupled to the database now. (If a table or column is refactored then the clients will have to change too)
EF offers a bit of flexibility on how your data is presented and could be used to hide some minor database changes that don't affect the client apps. But I have found it to be quite limited. (See this post for an example) I have found that the POCO templates (while nice for allowing separation of the model and the entities) also does not offer very much flexibility.
So, the question: What do I tell my co-worker? How do I setup my WCF Data Services so they are using business oriented contracts (like they would be if every read operation used a standard WCF Soap based service)?
Just to be clear, let me ask this a different way. How can I decouple EF from WCF Data Services. I am fine to make up my own contracts and use AutoMapper to convert between them. But I would like to not go directly from EF to OData.
NOTE: I still want to use EF as my ORM. Rolling my own ORM is not really a solution...
If you use your custom classes instead of using classes generated directly by EF you will also change a provide for WCF Data Services. It means you will no more pass EF context as generic parameter to DataService base class. This will be OK if you have read only services but once you expect any data modifications from clients you will have a lot of work to do.
Data services based on EF context supports data modifications. All other data services use reflection provider which is read only by default until you implement IUpdatable on your custom "service context class".
Data services are technology for creating quickly services exposing your data. They are coupled with their context and it is responsibility of the context to provide abstraction. If you want to make quick and easy services you are dependent on features supported by EF mapping. You can make some abstractions in EDMX, you can make projections (DefiningQuery, QueryView) etc. but all these features have some limitations (for example projections are readonly unless you use stored procedures for modifications).
Data services are not the same as providing connection to database. There is one very big difference - connection to database will ensure only access and execution permissions but it will not ensure data security. WCF Data Services offer data security because you can create interceptors which will add filters to queries to retrieve only data the user is allowed to see or check if he is allowed to modify the data. That is the difference you can tell your colleague.
In case of abstraction - do you want a quick easy solution or not? You can inject abstraction layer between service and ORM but you need to implement mentioned method and you have to test it.
Most simple approach:
DO NOT PUBLISH YOUR TABLES ;)
Make a separate schema
Add views to this
Put those views to EF and publish them.
The views are decoupled from the tables and thus can be simplified and refactored separately.
Standard approach, also for reporting.
Apart from achieving more granular data authorisation (based of certain field values etc) OData also allows your data to be accessible via open standards like JSON/Xml over Http using OAuth. This is very useful for the web/mobile applications. Now you could create a web service to expose your data but that will warrant a change every time your client needs change in the data requirements (e.g. extra fields needed) whereas OData allows this via OData queries. In a big enterprise this is also useful for designing security at infrastructure level as it will only allow the text based (http) calls which can be inspected/verified for security threats via network firewalls'.
You have some other options for your OData client. Have a look at Simple.OData.Client, described in this article: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/686240/reasons-to-consume-OData-feeds-using-Simple-ODa
And in case you are familiar with Simple.Data microORM, there is an OData adapter for it:
https://github.com/simplefx/Simple.OData/wiki
UPDATE. My recommendations go for client choice while your question is about setting up your server side. Then of course they are not what you are asking. I will leave however my answer so you aware of client alternatives.
I could be totally misunderstanding Entity Framework here. I want to use that in my latest project (how else do you learn?) The problem is that the IBM i driver doesn't have support for that built in. Is is possible to create that framework from scratch? It is worth it?
It sounds like you'd be writing your own ADO.NET data provider to connect to IBM DB2 for i. Microsoft provides documentation for creating your own provider and a sample.
The data provider would be responsible for communicating with the database, so I'm not sure how you'd accomplish that. Either you'd be implementing your own connection to the database server running on the i (maybe you can port the SQL piece of JTOpen), or you'd be delegating your calls to the IBM-provided data provider (if that's even possible) or other data access method.
I couldn't decide whether I thought this was (1) a huge pain in the butt or (2) an opportunity for an open source project. (I guess it could be both.) It seems like it'd be easier to lobby IBM to make this part of their stock provider. You might complain about it on MIDRANGE-L and see if people will take up the cause.
Disclaimer: I am a newbie in the .NET world, so maybe there's an easier way to accomplish what you're trying to do.
I’m just working on this interesting thing with ADO.net entities and need your opinion. Often a solution would be created to provide a service (WCF or web service) to allow access to the DB via the entity framework, but I working on an application that runs internally and has domain access pretty much all the time. The question is if it’s good practice to create a data service for the application to interface from or could I go from the WPF application directly to the entity framework. What’s the best practice in this case and what are some of the pros’ and cons’ to the two different approach.
By using entity framework directly, do you mean that the WPF application would connect to the database, or that it would still use services but re-use the entities?
If it's the first approach, I tend to be against this because it means multiple clients connecting to the database, which a) is an additional security concern, b) could make it more expensive from a licensing perspective, and c) means you don't get the benefits of connection pooling. Databases are the most expensive things to scale so I'd try to design the solution to use services and reduce the pressure on the database. But there are times when it's appropriate. One thing I've noticed is that applications which do start out connecting directly tend to get refactored to go via a service later; it seldom happens the other way around. But it might also be a case of YAGNI.
If it's the second approach, I think that's fine. It's common for people looking at WCF to think "service oriented" - that is, there should be a strict contract between services and things shouldn't be shared. But a "multi-tier" application, which is only designed to have one client, is also a perfectly valid architecture and doesn't need to be so decoupled. In that case, reusing the entities on both sides of the service boundary should be fine. However, I'm not sure how easy this is to do with EF specifically, since I haven't used it except in experiments.
It really depends on the level of complexity and the required level of coupling/modularity. I think a good compromise would be to create a EF model in it's own library or the like with a simple level of abstraction. In that scenario if you chose to change the model to use an exposed service instead of direct access it shouldn't be a big deal to refactor existing code and the new service could utilize the existing library.