Book Image

Entity Framework Tutorial

By : Joydip Kanjilal
Book Image

Entity Framework Tutorial

By: Joydip Kanjilal

Overview of this book

<p>The ADO.NET Entity Framework is a new way to build the data access layer of your Windows or web applications. It's an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) technology that makes it easy to tie together the data in your database with the objects in your applications, by abstracting the object model of an application from its relational or logical model.<br /><br />This clear and concise book gets you started with the Entity Framework and carefully gives you the skills to speed up your application development by constructing a better data access layer. It shows you how to get the most from the ADO.NET Entity Framework to perform CRUD operations with complex data in your applications.<br /><br />This tutorial starts out with the basics of the Entity Framework, showing plenty of examples to get you started using it in your own code. You will learn how to create an Entity Data Model, and then take this further with Entity types. You will also learn about the Entity Client data provider, learn how to create statements in Entity SQL, and get to grips with ADO.NET Data Services, also known as Project Astoria.</p>
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Entity Framework Tutorial
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Entities, Entity Types, and Relationships in the ADO.NET Entity Data Model (EDM)


The Entity Data Model (EDM) is an implementation for the Entity-Relationship model (commonly called the E-R model). It depicts entities and their relationships. The EDM is a view of the data store that your application will use.

Before we delve deep into our Payroll EDM, let's have a discussion of entities, entity types, relationships, and how these are all represented.

What is an Entity?

An Entity essentially models individual, real-world objects like employees and customers. Such objects contain information pertaining to the entity. An entity is something that is uniquely definable, distinctly identifiable, and can have one or more of the following properties:

  1. 1. It should be easily identifiable through the data that it holds.

  2. 2. It should have properties that can hold scalar values that represent the entity's data.

  3. 3. It should only contain data, not methods or operations on the data.

  4. 4. It can have entity relationship...