Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

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infoblog » Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010 — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:46:53 GMT

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Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

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re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Kristofer — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 06:08:14 GMT

Neat, this will be a killer feature.

Some [minor] UI suggestions:

1) "Add New Artifact Generation Item" does not make it totally obvious what the menu option does. "Customize code generation" perhaps?

2) Give the .tt template the same name as the .edmx file it belongs to; this makes it more obvious what it is for when used in a large and cluttered project.

3) Show the .tt template as a sub-item to the .edmx file in the project hierarchy. (i.e. set "DependentUpon" in the .csproj/.vbproj file)

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Kristofer — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:33:51 GMT

...and one more thing... (I know I said it before, but I think it is worth repeating :) )

To make the "Influence generated classes based on structural annotations in CSDL" scenario you mentioned possible and more compelling/easier to use in real world scenarios, either:

a) allow structural annotation XSDs to be "plugged in" to the designer so that any additional properties can be accessed (viewed and edited) using the property editor.

...and/or...

b) add some other kind of extensibility interface to make it possible to view/edit structural annotations directly in the designer.

Mockup screenshot showing an example of how that kind of designer extensibility could be used:

http://blog.huagati.com/res/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/efDesignerSAMockup.png

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Sanjay Nagamangalam - MSFT — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:24:43 GMT

@Kristofer: yep, we considered the options you suggested among several others.

1) "Add New Artifact Generation Item"

>> Our design lets users surface custom VS item templates in the "Add New Item" dialog that we launch from the designer as long as they conform to our naming prefix convention. They may or may not have .tt files and may indeed have nothing to do with code generation at all.

2) Give the .tt template the same name as the .edmx file it belongs to

>> Yep, we looked at this and if possible, we might pre-populate a file name when we launch the "Add New Item" dialog from the designer. Users will more than likely want to change the file name so we want to leverage familiar VS paradigms here.

3) Show the .tt template as a sub-item to the .edmx file in the project hierarchy.

>> We had lots of discussions around this. In the end, we felt the ideal user experience was to let the VS item template do what it does by default and not force it to put its files someplace we want.

Our design allows users to create VS item templates that may have multiple .tt files (and/or other files) that may process the same or different EDMX file. In such scenarios, users may find it awkward if we forcibly put all files added by the item template as dependent files of the EDMX. We also felt that "grand-children" files in Solution Explorer look a bit strange and may have undesired Source Control consequences (e.g. checking out the EDMX file will also check out the child .tt file, etc).

More advanced customizations could include a custom wizard in the VS item template which could put files anywhere in the project hierarchy.

Hope this helps answer your questions.

Regards,

Sanjay

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Kristofer — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:33:48 GMT

@Sanjay,

Thx for the clarification.

Re. #1: what I meant was that "artifact generation item" menu name is language that may be crystal clear to the designer of the feature but a first time user will have no clue what it means. And it does not translate very well (to localized versions of VS).

#3: Maybe you could solve it with a setting somewhere (e.g. Tools/Options/EDM Designer/...) to control this behavior..?

Personally I would like to see the templates that belong to a certain EDMX listed together with it rather than elsewhere in the project hierarchy so if this behavior can be customized that would allow both behaviors.

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Craig Stuntz — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:04:57 GMT

I was going to write some comments, but Kristofer already said everything I was going to write. Saw to say that I agree with him, especially the part about how this looks like a really, really nice feature.

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

JasonBSteele — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:37:18 GMT

Will the next designer be able to view subsets of the EDMX, or multiple EDMX's be partial classes of each other?

For any significantly sized project there are too many entities for one designer page.

thanks,

Jason

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Sanjay Nagamangalam - MSFT — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 01:40:55 GMT

@Kristofer: Thanks for your feedback.

RE: #1: "artifact generation item" menu

We've restarted the discussion in the team and will try & come up with a better menu name that is more intuitive to first time users.

RE: #2: A "Tools...Options" setting to specify if the files added by the VS item template should be child files of the EDMX seems like a reasonable proposal. However, adding arbitrary files as child files of the EDMX file may not work in all scenarios. Some examples that come to mind are ASP.NET website projects and custom 3rd party VS item templates that add multiple .tt files and/or other files (e.g. code snippets, XAML files, etc) that are in fact not dependent on the EDMX file. Our current design lets 3rd party VS item template & wizard authors do the right thing instead of forcibly making their files dependent files of the EDMX. We’ll certainly look for user feedback and review the design.

@Jason:

While we understand your scenario, it does not look like the next version of the designer will support viewing subsets of the EDMX at the moment. Can you explain a bit more by what you mean by “multiple EDMX's be partial classes of each other?”. Feel free to send me e-mail at: sanagama –at– microsoft –dot– com

Regards,

Sanjay

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Menny — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:54:45 GMT

I don’t get it

You are doing great work here, but I don’t get it.

Diving into the EDMX file or the T4 template is not something I’m eager to do, these files are not user friendly at all, and I know some of you second guess me here.

I wish there would be more designer support instead of text support for something simple as breaking the designer into files, or setting the ObjectContext to be internal. Adding an attribute or an interface require more so the T4 seems to be the right way although I can think of other way’s doing it in the CSDL portion.

I don’t get it because I’m catching the drift that you are targeting small to medium project and not enterprise one.

Since the store procedure support still seems far far away. Things like mapping multiple result sets of sp’s with output params still looks like they’re farfetched. Where scenarios like result set + paging data are very common…

Looking at http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/archive/2008/07/18/using-stored-procedures-to-get-load-structured-data.aspx does not enlighten things at all

Most of the DBA’s I have talked with looks at the EF as a “break point” between the interface they supply (sp’s) and what EF aims for.

Sorry for my pessimistic approach here, still these are my two cents on the subject

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Kristofer — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:08:28 GMT

@Menny,

I think what MSFT is aiming for here is a flexible enough toolset that allow anyone to customize whatever may need customization. On top of that I am sure there will be loads of third party or community built templates and toolkits that add the extra 'bits and pieces' so that not every end-user have to edit their own T4 templates.

In short, this is the foundation and template libraries, customization dialogs, add-ins etc goes on top of that. Either as something provided by MSFT, third-parties, or community/open source things on codeplex.

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Menny — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:25:44 GMT

I'm sure it is the foundation but i still think that common tasks like i mentioned should not be integrated via template (T4) editing)

Tip 3 - Getting started with T4

Meta-Me — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 05:03:40 GMT

So if you've been reading the Entity Framework Design Blog you will have heard us talk about T4 . It

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Anantharaman — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:31:16 GMT

Will EF 2.0 support the concept of populating an EntitySet from an Insert / Update / Delete Function ?

E.g. To support the scenario where an Insert Stored Procedure does an insert into a table followed by Select <fields> from table , which returns multiple rows. ( kind of piggy backing select statement on Insert SP Call ) . Therefore the Insert Function can have a return type as Collection(EntityType).

The idea is to avoid making another call to database just to fetch the latest property values for entities.

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

danieldsmith — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:38:44 GMT

I'm with Kristofer - I'd definitely rather see the associated .tt files grouped as child items under the .edmx file. It's much cleaner and less cluttered that way.

In response to Sanjay's comments on this:

I don't think .tt templates as child items would look strange at all. In fact it's what I'd *expect* to see.

Regarding source control checking out the child items being undesired - I completely disagree. I *want* the child items to also be forcibly checked out. I don't want my build breaking or wrong code being generated if the templates are missing!

Self-Tracking Entities in the Entity Framework

Entity Framework Design — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:51:07 GMT

Background One of the biggest pieces of feedback we received from the N-Tier Improvements for Entity

Self-Tracking Entities

Meta-Me — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:09:48 GMT

Lots of the feedback we got on the EF design blog about our early N-Tier plans , highlighted that lots

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

DZ Zweigle — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:19:13 GMT

Being a noob and wishing to know more--Can you point me sites, blogs, books, examples for me to learn, use and prepare for VS2010.

Any help is appreciated.

thanks,

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

Daniel Simmons — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:31:35 GMT

@DZ Zweigle,

One of the best resources around for learning about T4 is the blog of Oleg Sych. Try this out: http://www.olegsych.com/tag/t4/

- Danny

New EntityFramework

こだかたろうです — Mon, 25 May 2009 18:22:59 GMT

このところ、書籍の執筆とWindows7でなかなか手に付かなかったのですが、実は次期Visual StudioのBetaがリリースされてます。 Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework

Tip 3 - How to get started with T4

VS2010学习 — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:36:37 GMT

So if you've been reading the Entity Framework Design Blog you will have heard us talk about T4

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

hello — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:40:13 GMT

hello world in new world ya world ya world

re: Customizing Entity Classes in VS 2010

bio — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:42:27 GMT

i think entity frame work is good data access but the csla frame work is perfiect to developer to work by it.