Introducing ADO.NET Entity Framework

This is the third and final part of my ORM series in which I am going to introduce the ADO.NET Entity Framework, an in-built Object Relational Mapping model of the .NET Framework.

Similar to the previous post, this one also covers the same four principles -

• Configuring a .NET project for the ADO.NET Entity Framework
• Inserting data from Objects directly
• Retrieving data using Object Lists an LINQ
• Changing the Database Management System

Though the screen-shots and the example codes emphasize on C#, the principles are same for all the .NET languages.

Requirements to run the example in this article - Visual C# Express, SQL Server Express and MySQL. Download Visual C# Express here, SQL Server Express here and MySQL here.

Configuring a .NET project for the ADO.NET Entity Framework

To configure a .NET project to work with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, an Entity Data Model is added to the project. The Entity Data Model is primarily a schematic representation of the database tables stored as a XML file. Each of these tables is converted into a class and foreign key relationships between these tables are maintained as Lists inside the objects.

Visual Studio provides a Wizard to create Entity Data Models. Right click on the project and select New Item from the Add menu. Choose the ADO.NET Entity Data Model template from the chooser. There are two approaches available to build the Entity Data Model - Database First Approach and the Model First Approach.

In the Database First Approach, the Entity Data Model is generated from existing table structures. The wizard allows the developer to setup a connection by providing the Database Server name and the Database name. The wizard also allows developers to choose tables, views and stored procedure that are to be a part of the Entity Data Model.

In the Model First Approach, the Entity Data Model is created from scratch and the database tables are generated based on this model.

Once the wizard completes, a designer opens up which shows a schematic representation of the generated .edmx file. This file contains the table mappings as a XML along with a code behind file with a .Designder.cs extension for the auto-generated classes corresponding to the tables. However a drawback with the Entity Data Model is that it combines all the classes into a single file which makes manual maintainence a little difficult.

I used the Database First approach to create the sample application to insert and retrieve data. You can get the MySQL and SQL Server scripts along with the Visual Studio solution here.

Inserting data from Objects directly

The Entity Model generates a class which inherits from ObjectContext. This class acts as a data manager to connect to the Database Management System to retrieve, insert, update and delete records.

ADO.NET Entity Framework maintains the records of the table as a List of objects. To insert new records into the table, create new objects, add them to the appropriate lists and then save the changes using a ObjectContext instance. The following piece of code shows how objects can be persisted -

using (Context context = new Context())
{
// Create the object
context.Objects.Add(object);
context.SaveChanges();
}

ADO.NET Entity Framework does a wonderful job while storing objects with foreign key dependencies. These dependencies are maintained using lists as objects and while storing these records, the appropriate identity keys are inserted into the child tables. However this feature is limited to a few DBMS like SQL Server.

Retrieving data using LINQ and Object Lists

The ADO.NET Entity Framework retrieves data from the back-end tables in the form of object lists. So accessing records is as simple as iterating through these lists.

using (Context context = new Context())
{
foreach (Object object in context.Objects)
// use the object appropriately
}

Since data retrieval is in the form of lists, developers can piggy-back on an other .NET framework feature - LINQ (Language Integrated Query). LINQ makes conditional querying of data a lot easier.

using (Context context = new Context())
{
var objects = from object in context.Objects where "condition" select object;
// use the objects
}

Changing the Database Management System

Before changing the DBMS of the Entity Model, it is important to understand how the ADO.NET Entity Framework stores the connection strings and the mapping between classes and the back-end tables. The connection string is stored in the App.Config file of the project and the table mappings are stored as a XML in the form of the .edmx file as mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately the ADO.NET Entity Framework varies it's implementation with the DBMS. Because of this modifying the XML manually isn't easy. For Example, ADO.NET Entity Framework does not support foreign key constraints in the form of lists for DBMS like MySQL.

The sample application contains another Entity Model which connects to a MySQL Server containing similar tables. To use MySQL with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, an connector is needed. The MySQL Connector/NET is available here.