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

Mapping Stored Procedures that Return Custom Entity Types


In this section, we will discuss how we can use the EDM to map stored procedures that return miscellaneous data. Let's consider a scenario where we need to create an entity that returns the EmployeeID, FirstName, and LastName of all employees who are no longer working in the organization.

To do this, follow these steps:

  1. 1. Create a stored procedure called OldEmployees. Here is the script:

    Create procedure OldEmployees
    as
    Select EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName from Employee where LeavingDate is not null
    
  2. 2. Create an Entity called OldEmployees in the EDM with the property names matching the corresponding field names of the stored procedure.

  3. 3. Create an EntityType called OldEmployees in the CSDL

    <EntityType Name="OldEmployees">
    <Key>
    <PropertyRef Name="EmployeeID" />
    </Key>
    <Property Name="EmployeeID" Type="Int32" Nullable="false" />
    <Property Name="FirstName" Type="Int32" Nullable="true" />
    <Property...