There are two ways of creating ORM models - Model-First Approach and Database-First approach. Entity Developer supports both approaches for designing Entity Framework, NHibernate, LinqConnect, and LINQ to SQL models.
Database-First approach allows you to use legacy database in your ORM application. It supposes that you already have existing database and build your entity model based on this database.
How to Start
In Visual Studio Entity Data Models, entities are generated from database tables with the help of Entity Data Model Wizard. In LINQ to SQL models, entities are generated by dragging database tables from Server Explorer to the diagram. Entity Developer implements both ways of generating entities from database tables - with Create Model Wizard and by dragging database tables from Database Explorer to the diagram. They are available for all supported types of models. For NHibernate models you can also use the option of Import that allows you to use existing NHibernate xml-mappings from various sources.
Flexible Naming Rules
Entity Developer allows flexible tweaking for the generated names of entity sets, classes, methods and their members. You may configure case and pluralization, removing and adding of prefixes and suffixes, etc. Naming rules can be set up on the corresponding Create New Model wizard page or in the Model Settings dialog box.
Advanced Model Mapping Tweaking Tools
Entity Developer offers many additional visual tools to configure mapping aspects, that cannot be automatically generated from database. Creating inheritance hierarchies is very easy owing to convenient editors and the Model Refactoring functionality, and thus can be performed completely without manual editing of XML code. For Entity Framework you may map entities to one or more tables or split table to two separate entities, create entities (Defining Query) and procedures (Command Text) from SQL statements, use complex types, and edit the storage part of the model.
Easy Updating Model from Database
When developing a model using the Database-First approach you may need to make changes to your database and then reflect these changes in your model. With Entity Developer, you can use Update From Database Wizard that allows synchronizing your model with the database for LinqConnect, NHibernate and Entity Framework in a fast and convenient way.
In Visual Studio, the Update Wizard performs such updating for Entity Framework models. However, when updating model, the wizard resets all manual changes to the model. Unlike standard Visual Studio Update Wizard, Entity Developer Update From Database Wizard tries to preserve manual changes to the model where possible. The wizard detects all the database changes that can affect the model, e.g. created and deleted tables and views, their columns and foreign keys, column datatype changes, created and deleted stored procedures and functions, changes to their parameters etc.
|
Entity Developer also has a console application that allows generating models from databases, generating scripts that create or update database from model, via console commands. |
