I am using Entity Framework with asp.net mvc3 razor. Now I have a table which represents Countries (like India, US) etc. And my requirement is I need to open a pop-up with the flags of all countries which I have in my database. And when user click on one flag I need to show that particular country details first and remaining as line by line in the webgrid(asp.net mvc3 razor)
So I prepared a list of "Countries" by getting all the countries from database. And I prepared another list OrderofCountries by adding Order(property) "1" to the which user had clicked. And from 2 to all the remaining countries. Now I need to join this list i.e "OrderofContries" with the remaining tables (from database as for the requirement). But Entity Framework raises an error:
Unable to create a constant value of type 'Slmg.BusinessObjects.CountriesBO'. Only primitive types ('such as Int32, String, and Guid') are supported in this context.
My idea here is by using order property I can sort the data so that I can get the required data.
Can we join our prepared list with the database table in Entity Framework? How to solve my issue. Can any one please help me to find the solution.
No you cannot join list in your application with database table unless you pull all data from that table to your application by calling ToList or AsEnumerable.
Related
In my database I have
a Members table which contains basic member details (MemberId [primary key - auto generated number], MemberName, IsActive).
a MembersDetails table which contains more detailed information about the member (Address, Phone, Birthday ...). MembersDetails has MemberId field as a foreign key to the Members table.
There's a reason (part of the app logic) that the 2 tables are separated and are not all in one table.
I've created a view that gets a full member details (a join of the 2 tables), and Entity Framework created an object that represents the view.
I have 2 questions:
Is there a better way of flattening 2 joined tables into an object other than creating a view in the database?
I would like to create an object of the view type (a full user details), initialize it's properties and insert it to the database (which will put the info it needs in the Members table, the the generated id, and than insert to the MemberDetails table). Is there a way to do that?
Ad 1.
I think a database view will be a good choice for performance reasons.
But you can investigate an inheritance provided with the Entity Framework.
It allows you join two separated tables in one model object containing all properties (from "derived" and "base" table). Note, it will be OK for one to one relations (but not for one to many).
Implementing Inheritance with the Entity Framework 6 in an ASP.NET MVC 5 Application
Ad 2.
The Entity Framework inheritance will help you with this issue well. Alternatively, if you can use a database view, just create stored procedures for inserting and updating data included in a view, then map the stored procedures for specified actions on the view model generated by Entity Framework.
Is there a way to do conditional mapping in EF 6 with Code First.
We have a table called Entity which holds Suppliers, Customers and Employees. There is a flag field which identifies if a record is supplier, customer, employee or a combination of them. So we are using enum flags. In our code we have three domain objects (Supplier, Customer and Employee). I want to map these objects to the Entity table based on the flag field. Can somebody please tell me if this is possible in EF6. Please note that we are using Code First
We have a customer very large table with over 500 columns (i know someone does that!)
Many of these columns are in fact foreign keys to other tables.
We also have the requirement to eager load some of the related tables.
Is there any way in Linq to SQL or Dynamic Linq to specify what columns to be retrieved from the database?
I am looking for a linq statement that actually HAS this effect on the generated SQL Statement:
SELECT Id, Name FROM Book
When we run the reguar query generated by EF, SQL Server throws an error that you have reached the maximum number of columns that can be selected within a query!!!
Any help is much appreciated!
Yes exactly this is the case, the table has 500 columns and is self referencing our tool automatically eager loads the first level relations and this hits the SQL limit on number of columns that can be queried.
I was hoping that I can set to only load limited columns of the related Entities such as Id and Name (which is used in the UI to view the record to user)
I guess the other option is to control what FK columns should be eager loaded. However this still remains problem for tables that has a binary or ntext column which you may not want to load all the times.
Is there a way to hook multiple models (Entities) to the same table in Code First? We tried doing this I think the effort failed miserably.
Yes you can return only subset of columns by using projection:
var result = from x in context.LargeTable
select new { x.Id, x.Name };
The problem: projection and eager loading doesn't work together. Once you start using projections or custom joins you are changing shape of the query and you cannot use Include (EF will ignore it). The only way in such scenario is to manually include relations in the projected result set:
var result = from x in context.LargeTable
select new {
Id = x.Id,
Name = x.Name,
// You can filter or project relations as well
RelatedEnitites = x.SomeRelation.Where(...)
};
You can also project to specific type BUT that specific type must not be mapped (so you cannot for example project to LargeTable entity from my sample). Projection to the mapped entity can be done only on materialized data in Linq-to-objects.
Edit:
There is probably some misunderstanding how EF works. EF works on top of entities - entity is what you have mapped. If you map 500 columns to the entity, EF simply use that entity as you defined it. It means that querying loads entity and persisting saves entity.
Why it works this way? Entity is considered as atomic data structure and its data can be loaded and tracked only once - that is a key feature for ability to correctly persist changes back to the database. It doesn't mean that you should not load only subset of columns if you need it but you should understand that loading subset of columns doesn't define your original entity - it is considered as arbitrary view on data in your entity. This view is not tracked and cannot be persisted back to database without some additional effort (simply because EF doesn't hold any information about the origin of the projection).
EF also place some additional constraints on the ability to map the entity
Each table can be normally mapped only once. Why? Again because mapping table multiple times to different entities can break ability to correctly persist those entities - for example if any non-key column is mapped twice and you load instance of both entities mapped to the same record, which of mapped values will you use during saving changes?
There are two exceptions which allow you mapping table multiple times
Table per hierarchy inheritance - this is a mapping where table can contains records from multiple entity types defined in inheritance hierarchy. Columns mapped to the base entity in the hierarchy must be shared by all entities. Every derived entity type can have its own columns mapped to its specific properties (other entity types have these columns always empty). It is not possible to share column for derived properties among multiple entities. There must also be one additional column called discriminator telling EF which entity type is stored in the record - this columns cannot be mapped as property because it is already mapped as type discriminator.
Table splitting - this is direct solution for the single table mapping limitation. It allows you to split table into multiple entities with some constraints:
There must be one-to-one relation between entities. You have one central entity used to load the core data and all other entities are accessible through navigation properties from this entity. Eager loading, lazy loading and explicit loading works normally.
The relation is real 1-1 so both parts or relation must always exists.
Entities must not share any property except the key - this constraint will solve the initial problem because each modifiable property is mapped only once
Every entity from the split table must have a mapped key property
Insertion requires whole object graph to be populated because other entities can contain mapped required columns
Linq-to-Sql also contains ability to mark a column as lazy loaded but this feature is currently not available in EF - you can vote for that feature.
It leads to your options for optimization
Use projections to get read-only "view" for entity
You can do that in Linq query as I showed in the previous part of this answer
You can create database view and map it as a new "entity"
In EDMX you can also use Defining query or Query view to encapsulate either SQL or ESQL projection in your mapping
Use table splitting
EDMX allows you splitting table to many entities without any problem
Code first allows you splitting table as well but there are some problems when you split table to more than two entities (I think it requires each entity type to have navigation property to all other entity types from split table - that makes it really hard to use).
Create stored procedures that query the number of columns needed and then call the stored procs from code.
I am just starting to use the Entity Framework 4 for the first time ever. So far I am liking it but I am a bit confused on how to correctly do inheritance.
I am doing a model-first approach, and I have my Person entity with two subtype entities, Employee and Client. EF is correctly using the table per type approach, however I can't seem to figure out how to determine what type of a Person a specific object is.
For example, if I do something like
var people = from p in entities.Person select p;
return people.ToList<Person>();
In my list that I form from this, all I care about is the Id field so i don't want to actually query all the subtype tables (this is a webpage list with links, so all I need is the name and the Id, all in the Persons table).
However, I want to form different lists using this one query, one for each type of person (so one list for Clients and another for Employees).
The issue is if I have a Person entity, I can't see any way to determine if that entity is a Client or an Employee without querying the Client or Employee tables directly. How can I easily determine the subtype of an entity without performing a bunch of additional database queries?
Use .OfType<Client>() in your query to get just the clients. See OfType.
e.g. entities.Person.OfType<Client>() ...
Use is to test if a Person object is a specific sub-class, e.g. if (p is Employee) ...
BTW why isn't it entities.People? Did you not select the pluralization option?
I'm just starting out with the Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services and I've run into an issue that I can't seem to figure out. I have two tables, one that has user information and the other that has a created by field. Within the database, there isn't a foreign key between these tables. The user table contains an arbitrary Id, a username, and a display name. The created by field contains the user's username. In my entity I would like to have the user's display name since this is what I need to display and expose over the ADO.NET Data Service? I'm aware that I could restructure the database, but I was hoping that I could do the join using the username as I would in a SQL statement.
Thanks in advance,
-Damien
You can make a view using a join of both tables, and then use this object to display the user's name.
There's some info on mapping custom queries here.