Entity Developer Review, Part 1

Introduction

I recently started to use Entity Developer, by Devart, to generate entities from my databases. It is a commercial product, mind you, and I am in no way affiliated with them, I just happen to like it, so I am going to talk a bit about it.

A very strong point is that it supports out of the box NHibernate, Entity Framework and the now half-forgotten LINQ to SQL, which makes it stand out from other products. This is not going to be a thorough review, but I will post more as soon as I explore things in more depth.

Look and Feel

In general, the UI has a classic Windows appearance, with multiple floating windows, and there are a couple of skins available, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.

There’s a Database Explorer window which allows us to browse our databases and to see what’s in there (tables, views, functions and stored procedures), plus we can drag objects from it into the Diagram window, which will add this objects to the model.

The Diagram window allows automatic layout of the objects in it, having each in different colors, adding notes (nice!) and new model items (classes, inheritances, associations, enumerations. A diagram can be “stamped” with the author’s details (name, company, version, date, etc), which is good if we are to print it or generate a bitmap from it (supported natively). It can be zoomed and there’s a Diagram Overview window that shows the full model at once, so that we can easily spot objects outside of the visible area.

There may be several diagrams for an entity model, the core of an Entity Developer project, and this model has it’s own window, on which we can explore it and see all the mapped database objects and corresponding model items, including inheritances, associations, components (complex/value types), etc. We also have there the list of templates available for the current project type.

There’s the possibility to generate a SQL script from the model, but in NHibernate projects, only databases SQL Server, SQL Server Compact Edition, Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL, this requires that the proper .NET providers are present. For Entity Framework projects, I could only find the option to generate the script for SQL Server, and, of course, LINQ to SQL only supports SQL Server as well. There’s an option for updating the model from the database as well, in case we chose to generate it from the database.

It is of course possible to validate the model, and the Error List window will present all outcomes of this validation, which can either be errors or warnings. A nice thing: double clicking on a notification, we jump directly to the model item that caused it. It would be interesting as well to have the option to quick fix the problem, but I reckon it’s not always possible or easy to do in an automated fashion.

When it comes to actually generating the code, there are an endless number of options, from capitalization of properties, lazy loading of associations, inclusion of foreign keys, etc. These settings are of course dependent on the project (NHibernate, Entity Framework or LINQ to SQL), because not all libraries have the same features. The generation is based on T4 templates, which is nice, because they are a standard in .NET. Only one template for each API is include, but it is very easy to write our own, by copying from an existing one and modifying it to our liking. I have yet to find a T4 debugger, Entity Developer, unsurprisingly, does not offer one.

Conclusion

OK, so far I have talked in general about Entity Developer, in my next posts, I will talk about NHibernate and Entity Framework specifics and also about advanced functionality.