Code Second Migration Issues

 

A back door of a sort is to take advantage of the fact that Code First entities do have an injected EntityAspect, which you normally don't want to expose directly, but instead use something like an "EntityFacts" class as described here - http://drc.ideablade.com/devforce-2012/bin/view/Documentation/code-first-entityaspect#HEntityFacts.  Anyway, EntityAspect.CloneCore() will clone the entity.  There's one problem here, though, in that this clone will have an incorrect EntityState which you'll need to reset.  Here's a rough way to do it:

 

  var clone = EntityAspect.Wrap(anEntity).CloneCore().Entity as IEntity;
  clone.EntityAspect.EntityState = EntityState.Detached;

 

Still struggling with the PropertyMetadata though

 

In the EDMX-generated code, you'll see the PathFor method generated for every entity class like so:

 

 public static string PathFor(System.Linq.Expressions.Expression<System.Func<Employee, object>> expr) {
   return IbCore.PropertyPath.For<Employee>(expr);
 }

 

You have several options for how you handle this:  one would be to directly call the IdeaBlade.Core.PropertyPath method instead of using PathFor; another would be to include this helper method in your entity class definitions; and another might be to include this in a base or helper class as a generic method: 

 

public static string PathFor<T>(System.Linq.Expressions.Expression<System.Func<T, object>> expr) {
  return PropertyPath.For<T>(expr);
}

 

The PropertyMetadata is a bit different.  In EDMX-based models PropertyMetadata is a nested class within each entity holding the static data property definitions for the entity.  In a Code First model, all metadata is dynamically loaded from the ibmmx file, and is available in the EntityMetadataStore.  

 

So again you should decide how best to architect this in your solution.  You can access metadata for an entity like so:

 

  public static EntityMetadata PropertyMetadata {
    get { return EntityMetadataStore.Instance.GetEntityMetadata(typeof(Employee)); }
  }

 

Entity properties are available from the EntityMetadata in several ways, for example:

   Employee.PropertyMetadata.EntityProperties

   Employee.PropertyMetadata.DataProperties

   Employee.PropertyMetadata.NavigationProperties

   ... and others

 

So you might have a simple helper method like the following:

  public static EntityProperty GetPropertyMetadata(string prop) {
    return PropertyMetadata.EntityProperties[prop];
  }

 

More information on the metadata available is here - http://drc.ideablade.com/devforce-2012/bin/view/Documentation/model-examine.

 

 

  

 

 

 

As you say what I seem to be running into is the functionality that is not present in code-first that is there for the edm use.

It would be nice if these differences were documented somewhere. Do you know where such a resource is?

I will work through the rest of the build errors. I guess I was hoping some of these would disappear once the ibmmx process occurred. But it seems that was wrong.

There were no Ideablade* files in teh MSBuild directories

 

Do you also have DF2010 installed?  If so, double check that all IdeaBlade assembly references are pointing to version 7.0.3.  If you have a version of DF2010 prior to 6.1.9 that will cause problems too, as side-by-side installations of both products are only supported with 6.1.9 and above.