Entity Developer

Entity Developer 5.0 introduces a range of new features we hope you will find useful in your work. Starting with this version, Entity Developer supports DB2 and Firebird DBMSs and several third-party data providers. Besides, for the sake of your convenience, we have optimized certain features, added a number of new keyboard shortcuts and implemented the feature of transformation.

DB2 and Firebird Support

Starting with this version Entity Developer provides compatibility of Entity Framework and NHibernate models with DB2 and Firebird RDBMSs.

Third-Party Providers Support

From now on Entity Developer works with the following third-party providers:

• Oracle DBMS – Oracle Data Provider for .NET
• MySQL DBMS – MySQL Connector/Net
• PostgreSQL DBMS – Npgsql
• SQLite DBMS – System.Data.SQLite
• DB2 DBMS – IBM DB2 .NET Data Provider
• Firebird DBMS – Firebird ADO.NET Data Provider

Model Refactoring

The functionality of model refactoring greatly simplifies and automates such operations as creating complex types from properties, common to several entities, or creating TPT or TPC hierarchies from several entities. Now you can just select these entities on a diagram, right-click them, and select Model Refactoring from the shortcut menu. Then select the required action in the opened Model Refactoring Wizard and complete its steps, and Entity Developer will perform the selected action automatically.

Dialog Box Improvements for Entity Framework Models

The Property Editor dialog box is now enhanced with multiple options that were previously available only in the Properties docking window; now you can use it to specify code generation options, the corresponding object in the storage part, facet and validation framework settings.

The Inheritance Editor dialog box options have been extended to facilitate the process of TPH inheritance creation – now you don’t have to take extra steps and use the Mapping Details dialog, all you need is now available in one dialog box.

Configure Behaviour dialog box was renamed to Stored Procedure Mapping. Automapping of stored procedure parameters and class properties now works more efficiently in this dialog box. In some cases it even matches stored procedures with unnamed parameters, which is especially useful when working with PostgreSQL. Besides, two new check boxes have been added to this dialog box. One of them enables hiding stored procedures that are likely not to fit for mapping of certain action for a specific class. The other check-box enables hiding stored procedures that are already used in the model for Insert/Update/Delete mapping or as a method of the conceptual model.

New Options for Working with the Storage Part

Entity Developer 5.0 allows you to locate objects in the Storage part, that correspond to objects in the Conceptual part of the Entity Framework model. This can be done via the Select Storage shortcut menu item of the class, property, association and method. At the same time, the Create Storage and Mapping shortcut menu item allows you to create objects corresponding to classes, properties and associations existing in the Conceptual model but absent in the Storage part. The Storage field available in the Editor dialog boxes for classes, properties and methods enable quick and convenient mapping of these objects to their storage part counterparts.

Synchronization Improvements

We have improved column naming rules in the Storage part when synchronization is enabled. When a complex type property is added to a class, if the name of this property ends with the name of the corresponding complex type (e.g. CustomerAddress property within a class and the corresponding Address complex type), column names within the Storage part will contain the prefix taken from the property name, for example, Customer.

If, when creating an association between 2 classes, Entity Developer finds out that the names of the primary key columns are the same, a constraint property is created in the child class with the name that consists of the parent class foreign key name and the prefix equal to the parent class name:

New Keyboard Shortcuts

Entity Developer 5.0 introduces new keyboard shortcuts:

• INSERT – pressing this shortcut key will create a new class or add a new property to a class, enum or complex type.
• ALT+P – pressing this combination, when a class, enum or complex type is active calls the Property Editor dialog so that you could immediately configure a new property;
• SHIFT+DELETE – this combination deletes the selected class, enum or complex type from the diagram area only;
• DELETE – pressing this key will delete the object from the conceptual model together with the corresponding storage model objects.

Other Usability Improvements

In case you choose not to apply changes to some column or constraint when using Update To/From Database functionality, Entity Developer will ‘remember’ it and next time will not offer to apply changes to this object, i.e. in the Choose Actions tree the object will not be selected by default.

If a complex type is not mapped, this is now indicated in the Error List window with the corresponding warning message: The complex type ‘<type name>’ is not used by any object within the model.

This article explains and gives a practical example of how support of сomponent navigation properties is implemented in Entity Developer for NHibernate.
Support of this functionality includes the possibility of detaching to a complex type for further reusability not only scalar entity properties but also navigation properties with subsequent customization of complete mapping at the level of private mapping of a certain property with type equal to complex type of a certain entity.

There are several ways of component navigation properties mapping in NHibernate:

• Many-to-one;
• One-to-many;
• One-to-one;
• Many-to-many.

In this article we will consider the most popular of them, i.e. many-to-one mapping of сomponent navigation properties. We will not focus on one-to-many and one-to-one types of сomponent navigation properties mapping, as these types of mapping are not very common, besides, their usage and customization have little difference from the example under consideration and so are quite comprehensible. Many-to-many mapping is considered in details in the article Support of Many-to-Many Mapping for Component Navigation Properties in Entity Developer.
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This article explains and gives a practical example of how support of сomponent navigation properties is implemented in Entity Developer for NHibernate.
Support of this functionality includes the possibility of detaching to a complex type for further reusability not only scalar entity properties but also navigation properties with subsequent customization of complete mapping at the level of private mapping of a certain property with type equal to complex type of a certain entity.

There are several ways of component navigation properties mapping in NHibernate:

• Many-to-one;
• One-to-many;
• One-to-one;
• Many-to-many.

In this article we will consider many-to-many mapping of сomponent navigation properties.
To find out more about the rest of the types of сomponent navigation properties mapping, see the article devoted to them here.
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This article explains and gives a practical example of how support of сomponent collections is implemented in Entity Developer for NHibernate. You can take a close look at this type of mapping in the NHibernate documentation here.
This article contains examples of mapping for the following associations:

• Classic mapping of component collections;
• A special case of component collections mapping for a many-to-many association.

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As of version 4.1, Entity Developer supports several capabilities for visual presentation such as entity shape coloring, selection-driven highlighting and also contains sets of skins both for the application and its diagram.

This article deals with the following:

• Entity Shape Coloring
• Selection-Driven Highlighting
• Application And Diagram Skins

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Note: To use the template “DbContext”, Entity Framework 4.1 and Entity Framework 4.0 must be installed on your computer.

April 2011 saw the release of a new version of Entity Framework 4.1 that supports fluent mapping and DbContext API. The latest version of Devart Entity Developer is extended with the DbContext template that enables the use of new features in EF v4.1. Initially, fluent mapping was intended to be used in the Code-First (Code Only) approach. However, thanks to our new template, fluent mapping can now be used not only in the Code-First approach, but in the Database-First/Model-First approaches as well.
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• Introducing
• Enumeration support in databases
• Enumerations support in LINQ to SQL
  • Case management
• Entity Developer
  • User interface for enumerations
  • Creating enumerations
  • Naming rules
  • The model validation
  • Update Model From Database

• Entity Framework

Introducing

We keep receiving requests about enumeration support in Entity Developer from our customers. That’s why we plan to implement this functionality in the second half of 2010.

In this article we describe the functionality concerning enumeration support we plan to add. It is only a draft and these features are a subject to change. It depends on the customer suggestions in many respects, so if you have any suggestions or requirements concerning this functionality, please write them as comments to this article or in any other way comfortable for you.
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We have supported new functionality of Entity Framework 4 including Entity Framework v4 Release Candidate for dotConnect for Oracle, dotConnect for MySQL, dotConnect for PostgreSQL, and dotConnect for SQLite. In this article we consider basic new supported possibilities in comparison with Entity Framework v1. Take into account that the new features of Entity Framework v4 like Persistence Ignorance (POCO), Self-tracking entities, Code Only etc. which don’t require support of the provider writers aren’t described here.

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Our active user, Simon Kingaby, in his own blog has described experience of the web-based enterprise applications development by help of the following technologies: Devart dotConnect for Oracle, Entity Developer, Oracle 11 Database, Entity Framework, IdeaBlade DevForce, Microsoft Silverlight 3, Prism 2, and Unity.

You can view these articles by the following links:
IdeaBlade DevForce – Model Setup Walk-through – Background
IdeaBlade DevForce – Model Setup Walk-through – Step 1: The Entity Framework Project

Because of the increasing popularity of IdeaBlade among our users we plan to consider ways to improve its support. At first, we will implement a complete support of the custom attributes. Currently the serialization/deserialization of the conceptual model elements is provided only for part of them. Serialization of the conceptual model elements will be supported completely and EntityDeveloper will show and edit them in the next versions.

These changes will be useful for the users of the third-party tools which save additional information to the XML model as custom attributes. Also it will be useful for users who want to customize code generation – they can use attribute values in the code generation templates.

Introduction

In this article we consider how to build Entity Framework models using PostGIS objects in Entity Developer. PostGIS is a popular spatial extension for PostgreSQL that gives one an opportunity to work with geographic objects. To create and use such models we will:

• use a .NET wrapper for PostGIS (SharpMap)
• build a new Entity C# code generation template in order to enable geometry types support
• write some code dealing with change tracking

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