Introducing Entity Framework - Code-First Development with Entity Framework (2015)

Code-First Development with Entity Framework (2015)

Chapter 1. Introducing Entity Framework

In this chapter, you will be introduced to Entity Framework. You will gain an understanding of Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tools and the problems they solve. A brief history of Entity Framework will also be covered in this chapter. We will examine the capabilities of Entity Framework and its architecture.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

· ORM tools and the problems they solve

· A brief history of Entity Framework

· The capabilities of Entity Framework

· The overall architecture of Entity Framework

What is ORM?

When it comes to business software, almost all of it needs to store data that pertains to its functions. For many decades, Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) has been a go-to data storage for developers. ORM is a set of technologies that allows developers to access RDBMS data from an object-oriented programming language. There are other RDBMSes available, such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, and many more. These database systems share some common characteristics. Each system supports one or more databases. Databases consist of many tables. Each table stores data in a tabular format, divided into columns and rows. Data rows in multiple tables may relate to each other. For example, a person's details stored in the Person table can have phone numbers stored in a separate Phones table.

In the following screenshot, you can see a table that allows you to store a person's information, specifically their first and last names, along with a unique identifier for each person. This type of storage, where similar data items are grouped together into tabular structures is typical:

What is ORM?

Each column can also be constrained in some ways. For example, PersonId is an integer column. LastName is nvarchar(50) column, which means you can store Unicode data of variable size in it, up to 50 characters. You will see in subsequent chapters how we describe this information using Entity Framework.

The data stored in each column and row combination is scalar data, such as number or string. When software needs to persist or retrieve data, it must describe its intent, such as insert or select query, using the database-specific language called Structured QueryLanguage (SQL). SQL is a common standard for all relational database systems, as issued by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). However, some database systems have their own dialect on top of the common standard. In this book, we are not going to dive into the depths of SQL, but some concepts are important to understand. There are some basic commands that we need to look at. These are typically described as CRUD. CRUD stands for Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete. For example, if you want to retrieve or query the data from the preceding example, you would type the following:

SELECT PersonId, FirstName, LastName

FROM Person

Historically, before tools such as Entity Framework, developers embedded SQL language statements inside the software code using .NET languages, such as C# or VB.NET or other programming languages, such as C++ or Java. The reason for this is that these languages do not natively speak or understand SQL. For example, to retrieve the data from the database and manipulate it as objects, you would write a fair amount of code using ADO.NET, .NET Framework's data access built-in framework. You would need to define a class to hold a person's data. Then, you would need to open a connection to the database, create a command that uses the preceding query as its text, execute the command's reader, and iterate through the reader results, populating an instance of ourPerson class with the data from the reader. As you can see, there would be a lot of steps involved. More importantly, the code we'd write would be quite fragile.

For example, if we change the column name in our database from FirstName to First_Name, our code would still compile just fine, but would throw an exception when we try to run it. Moreover, the data in the database was stored as scalar values organized in columns and rows in a table, but our destination was an object or object graph. As you can see, this way of accessing the data has a number of issues.

First of all, there is a type mismatch between RDBMS column types and .NET types. Second, there is a mismatch between storage, which is a collection of scalar values, and destination, which is an object with properties. To further complicate the situation, our person object could also have a complex property that contains a list of phone numbers, which would be represented by a completely different table. These problems are collectively referred to as impedance mismatch between object-oriented programming and relational databases.

The set of tools called ORM came about to solve this mismatch problem. An ORM tool represents data stored in database tables as objects, native to a programming language, such as .NET languages, C#, and VB.NET. ORM tools have many advantages over the traditional code, such as ADO.NET code that we mentioned. They expose the data using native .NET types. They expose related data using simple .NET properties. They provide compile time checking. They solve the problem with typos. Developers do not have to use SQL, a different language. Instead in the .NET world, developers use Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) to query the data. LINQ is simply part of C# and VB.NET languages. We will cover the basics of LINQ in subsequent chapters. By the same token, programmers use an ORM tool's API to persist data to the database. Finally, as we will see later, you will write less code. Less code means fewer bugs, right?

A brief history of Entity Framework

Over the years, there have been many ORM tools entering the market; some commercial, others open source. Microsoft developed its own tools. First one was LINQ to SQL, which was built on .NET 3.5. This ORM only worked with SQL Server and SQL Server Compact. Entity Framework, which first shipped in 2008, was the second attempt. It had a number of advantages over LINQ to SQL. First of all, it had provider architecture, thus was open to working with all relational database engines, not just SQL Server, given that a provider was written for the engine in question. All major RDBMSes have Entity Framework providers at this point in time.

Entity Framework went through a few revisions. In the first version, only Database First approach was supported. What this meant was that you would point the designer to an existing database. As a result, code was generated that would contain a database and table abstractions. In addition to the code, an EDMX file was also created. This XML file contained Entity Data Model. It consisted of three models: logical, storage, and mapping. The logical, sometimes called conceptual, model is the one you will code against in C# or VB.NET. Storage model describes how data is stored in a database. The mapping model, as the name implies, provides the mapping between logical and storage models. If you were to change anything in the database, you would need to refresh the generated model. The C# or VB.NET code is also generated again. The mapping model has a class based on ObjectContext that has collection properties for each table in the database. Each collection is a generic collection, where collection item type is inherited from a base class in Entity Framework. Each class has properties that correspond to columns in the matching table.

In the second revision, version 4, the Model-First approach was supported as well. With this approach, you can use design surface to create entities, and then the designer would produce the SQL script to generate the database. With this approach, the EDMX file was still created, and the final result was the same as with the Database First approach. Developers had access to the same set of classes to give them the ability to persist and query data.

Finally, the Entity Framework Code-First approach was shipped in version 4.1. This approach eliminated the need for the EDMX file. It also eliminated the dependency on Entity Framework base classes that each entity in the model inherited from. As a result, the code became more testable. This approach also eliminated the need for the designer. You could just type your classes, and they would automatically be mapped to tables in the database. There have been subsequent Entity Framework Code-First releases after the the initial 4.1 version.

The capabilities of Entity Framework

Entity Framework can do a lot for us as Microsoft developers. First of all, it is capable of exposing the database as a set of objects. It does so by utilizing a couple of key classes. First and foremost, you need to be aware of DbContext. This class is at the heart of Entity Framework Code-First. At a high level, it is a database abstraction. Databases consist of tables, each consisting of rows and columns. DbContext in turn has generic collection properties; each of which can be typed as DbSet<TRowType>, corresponding to each table. Each object within the collection, referred to as an entity, represents a row in the corresponding table. Columns are defined by properties of the TRowType class that is specified as a generic argument of each collection.

Once this structure is laid out, you are capable of querying the underlying database by using LINQ queries. If you add a brand new instance of the TRowType class to its parent collection and then save the changes using the DbContext API, this new object will becomea row in the corresponding table, where each property value of that object will become a column value in the target row. On top of this, Entity Framework has capabilities to represent other database artifacts, such as procedures and functions. You will be able to query the data using functions, just like tables using LINQ again. The question of evolving the database structure is an important one. In most cases, you will need to add columns and tables, as your application changes. Entity Framework addresses this need via the Migrations feature. This ability will allow you to alter the database structure through C# code. In addition to adding and deleting tables and columns, you will be able to add indexes. Migrations allow developers to evolve a schema without data loss. As you can see, Entity Framework exposes everything you need to access the data in your C# or VB.NET code without wiring SQL and treats your database as another part of your overall application code. You can check migrations code into source control, since it is also C# code!

The Entity Framework architecture

Entity Framework is built on the provider architecture. When a developer creates a LINQ query using C# or VB.NET, the framework engine in conjunction with a provider converts it into an actual SQL statement that is sent to the database. Any given provider is the link between Entity Framework and a specific RDBMS that this provider is written for. In this book, we will concentrate on the Code-First approach, but this architecture is used in the Database First approach as well. Once the provider executes the final SQL command, its results are materialized into .NET objects by Entity Framework. Data reader is used for this purpose. It is important to understand that Entity Framework is still built on top of ADO.NET, thus it is uses concepts such as connection, command, and data reader. When it comes to data persistence, in other words; insert, update, and delete functionalities, the flow is as follows: In the case of inserts, a developer adds an instance of an entity class to the context. Similarly, an entity previously added to the context can be flagged as changed or deleted, causing the update or delete SQL statement to be executed against the database, respectively. Entity Framework examines the state of each object in its context, using the provider again to create an RDBMS-specific insert, update, or delete command.

Self-test questions

Q1. Which of these problems does an ORM tool solve?

1. Types in RDBMS and .NET framework are the same

2. Impedance mismatch between RDBMS and object-orientated programming

3. Learning SQL is hard

Q2. Developers must write SQL queries to work with Entity Framework. True or false?

Q3. What is the name of the technology that Entity framework uses to apply structural changes to the target database?

1. Updates

2. Conversions

3. Migrations

Q4. Which is the key class that represents database abstraction with the Entity Framework Code-First approach?

1. DbContext

2. ObjectContext

3. DataContext

Q5. Entity Framework can only work with Microsoft databases, such as SQL Server. True or false?

Summary

In this chapter, we took a look at how data is stored in RDBMS systems. We saw the shortcomings of using embedded SQL to access the data. We understood what ORM tools are all about and what problems they solve. We examined the history behind Entity Framework. We saw the capabilities of Entity Framework. Finally, we had a brief excursion into the Entity Framework architecture.

In the next chapter, we will actually build our first application based on Entity Framework Code-First.