I'm using Entity Framework Reverse Engineer Code First on an existing database. The classes are created properly but I need to change the entity names. I want to prefix every entity class with "EpiFlex". If a SQL table name is Users, the resulting entity should be EpiFlexUsers and the output file should be EpiFlexUsers.cs.
Is there a tag of some sort that I can add to the beginning of the T4 files to have that prefix added automatically or do I have to painstakingly go through each file and put the prefix ahead of the auto generated code?
Or maybe I'm totally missing the point. Is there another way to specify custom naming of the entities?
There doesn't seem to be any quick and easy way to do this. However, Programming Entity Framework 2nd Edition is an excellent book that I've come to consider absolutely essential if you're going to really get into entity framework. This book also has a lot of help on editing the T4 files. I haven't digested the complete section on T4 editing yet so maybe I'll still find something that shows how to very easily do what I want.
Here is a link to the book. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596807252.do
Related
To the point; is there any way to customize the pluralization service for database-first EF models?
Specifically, I'd like to use the *Set suffix notation, wherein the entity sets and collection navigation properties are named accordingly:
User to UserSet
Report to ReportSet
etc.
I know I've seen this made possible with code-first, however I'm stuck with database-first as the development process.
I'm aware of IPluralizationService, but can't figure out how to substitute my custom implementation.
Currently, I'm manually working through the entity sets and collection properties in the model browser (VS2015) and appending "Set" to each of them; this is fine to do once, however whenever I regenerate the model it becomes quite the pain in my ass.
Any suggestions?
You could write something that will update the edmx file to the new names.
Also I was going to suggest you could alter the t4 script (the .tt files) but I think that will break the mapping with the edmx file in a database first situation.
But I think you should reconsider code first, you can use the code first generator multiple times, just clean out the context class, and the connection string in the config and make a new context that is named the same (it will overwrite the table classes). You can nuget EntityFramework.CodeTemplates.CSharp and alter the t4 templates that it downloads to include "Set" and that is what it will use to generate the classes.
And then you don't fall into edmx hell, edmx files are a pain once you start trying to maintain them instead of letting them just be what is generated.
I ended up writing a script (PHP of all things) to perform XML transformations on the EDMX file. I lose support for some of the more obscure features due to the way the transformation is performed, however it was the only way I could do it without sacrificing kittens to an omniscient force. Most importantly, it maintains the mappings as expected.
I couldn't figure out a way to work the transformation script into the generation pipeline yet; though I may look at invoking it from the text template.
I'm aware that the question and its answers are 4 years old, but:
In EF6 you can implement a pluralization convention, and replace the default English pluralization with your own.
The original implementation uses a convention, which calls a service. I'm not sure whether you can simply register a service for IPluralizationService in the DependencyResolver, but you can definitely write your own convention.
The only warning is that the GitHub code relies on internal methods which you need to copy/substitute, e.g.
var entitySet = model.StoreModel.Container.EntitySets.SingleOrDefault(
e => e.ElementType == GetRootType(item));
replacing original
model.StoreModel.GetEntitySet(item);
and the method GetRootType().
Why when I saving the EDMX file in VS2012, hi always change the attributes of the component classes?
I use a marker there [NotMapped] with System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.Schema and it is always the same clause and using are removed.
EF does not support Agility methodologies?
1) I want to just make simple calculations on the data and display them in the attributes. For example, the document number is the number and prefix.
2) the model-first and code-first for me is not enough. I create an application based on data from the ERP and I have to add Me own document type. Half of the data is in the database and I can not duplicate it. The other half is my new tables. At the same time I do not know yet where I will use the data and I am not sure what the relationship between them I used. (I can not create a relationship right away in the diagram on the 500 tables). The client does not know yet what the data which depends. Typical thing to Agile methodologies.
Learn and use the code-first approach. It will give you full control over your POCOs (plain old class objects). The model-first approach requires that you use the EDMX modeler to make your changes which does not allow you to do much customization underneath.
Entity Framework Tutorial website is a good resource to get started as is the official Entity Framework website.
I have been working with Entity Framework 4 and SQL Server. The main problem I have found is that the table names in the database are all lower case and has underscore. This means that when I create the entities in Visual Studio, the classes and the properties are all lower case with underscores Is there any way to achieve Pascal Casing for the classes created and Camel Casing for the Properties?
Eg:
table_name--> to be converted as TableName
Is there any other templates need to be added or any other way to achieve this.
Editing the class name and properties manually in is not recommended as i have huge number of entities
Why not use a T4 template to generate the entity classes? That way, you can add a method to convert the table names to the convention of your choice.
VS comes with a couple of built-in T4 templates for EF, so it's very likely that you can just pick one of these and modify it. I wouldn't recommend writing your own from scratch!
If you haven't used T4 templates before, a quick start is to open your EF model in the designer, right-click a blank part of the design surface and choose "Add Code Generation Item." This will open a dialog with the installed T4 templates for EF, and you can choose whichever you feel most appropriate.
You can then right-click the T4 template files in Solution Explorer (it will have a .tt extension) and choose "Run Custom Tool" to generate the entities themselves. You can edit the .tt file (it's just a plain text file, containing something that looks horribly like VBScript!) and make the modifications. Then run the custom tool again and see if the generated entities have the right names.
Hope this helps.
The following blog post has a great response on how to do this. It involves modifying the T4 template file created when creating the data model.
http://khalidk7.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/entity-framework-ef-t4-template-modification-to-output-pascalcasing-database-objects/
I am using Entity Framework 4 with MVC 3 in Visual Studio 2012 (C#).
I am using database first; there are two separate databases each with its own namespace and with two separate edmx files. Each database has a table with the same name and fields (but different content). When I added the second table I started to get compile errors.
Ambiguity between 'Interface.CodeFormStatus.FormStatusCodeID'
and 'Interface.CodeFormStatus.FormStatusCodeID'
There seem to be some complex workarounds or I could rename one of the tables. Is there not a straightforward solution as this must be a fairly common issue.
I ran into a situation where I had two databases (one an older version of the other) and I needed to integrate both into a single project. Naturally, almost every name conflicted.
I created two separated edmx files for each database, and put each in its own namespace for clarity. I then edited each entity name to reflect which database it was coming from - (e.g. "Activities", which was in both, became "v13Activities" and "v14Activities").
For operations which were to be mirrored between both databases, I wrote a wrapper that included both contexts. This made my code was much less repetitive, and it had less synchronization issues.
Hope this approach helps someone else - it seems like this is an obscure question, and this answer was one of the top results on Google!
Update: In EF 6.1+, there is another solution. You can have "conflicting" names, and separate them with simple namespacing when using the "Code First From Database" option. I would advocate for this solution going forward, as the old XML .edmx style is going to be phased out starting in EF Core.
This worked for me. Just click on the table in the designer (the graphical version not the code) Then in the properties next to the, "Name" attribute you can change the name to something different. This will just change the name within the designer and used more as an alias throughout the application.
If you don't have many tables with the same name, then you could edit entity name in designer (your .edmx file).
So, just double-click a name of one of your CodeFormStatus entities and make it different (for example, change it to CodeFormStatusOther)
I'm starting a new application that must use an existing database that use some naming conventions that are really annoying in .net (table names start with several trigrams that specify the business domain of the table, column names start with the tables trigram, trigrams are in uppercase and separated by underscores, etc.,).
What I'd like to do is to write a simple renaming rule (this is as simple as finding the last underscore and take everything after that) and apply it in Entity Framework. I don't really want to edit the names one by one in the editor, especially because the database might change and I don't want to do it several times.
I'm using Database First (as the database already exists and it is "the master"), and EF 4.x DbContext Generator and it works really great out of the box (with badly named classes and properties though).
I edited the T4 templates in order to rename the generated entities and properties, but when I try to perform any request, the DbContext object can't find the table that matches with the entity I'm trying to request and I get this exception :
The entity type [Entity Name] is not part of the model for the
current context.
This is obvious why it doesn't find the table : nothing tells it how to match the entity name and the table as I changed it on the fly.
I read that I can add instructions in the OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) method but this is not used in Database First (and the default T4 template adds an exception in it, just in case).
So now I'm stuck, I don't know how to specify that matching.
Here are several ideas I have but not sure if it's correct or doable :
Using the "plural / singular" API to change the name of the Entity ? Sounds like a dirty workaround. But it might work (didn't try though).
Finding a way to edit the EDMX file on the fly.
Editing the EDMX afterwards but it might complicate the process (edit in the designer, then execute a tool to alter the EDMX, then run custom tool to regenerate entities and DbContext... while today I just have to edit in the designer).
Using Code First (as it seems easier to use different entity names than table names, through attributes or instructions in the DbContext class), but it sounds like it would not be more complicated to use it with an existing database.
Any idea ? Or did I miss something ?
You won't be able to use a T4 transform for this, as you want to change the content of the actual .edmx file to map your store entity names (with the obnoxious prefixes) to your sanitized conceptual entity names.
Instead, you're better off writing an application that takes an .edmx file as input and sanitizes the names under the conceptual model tag and modifies the mapping names to reflect the sanitized names. I understand that this is your third option and that you wanted to avoid this if possible, but this is the most straightforward way to go about it. Bear in mind that you'll only have to run this tool when you add new tables or columns.