Shamil Salakhetdinov
shamil at smsconsulting.spb.ru
Sun Aug 23 12:46:39 CDT 2009
Hi All, I have solved mentioned below issue by regenerating ADO.NET Entity Model: unfortunately that seems to be the only solution now - I'm writing unfortunately because regeneration forced me to get lost all my manual edits. Not that a big issue as my edits were mainly "cosmetic" - if to not count several hours, which I tried to find a workaround, which would allow me to preserve my "cosmetic" changes... I have also found that if I try to add new relationships to the source database and then use DDEWA to get updated only those relationships info in generated ADO.NET Entity Model then weird compiled errors appear, e.g.: Error 3007: Problem in Mapping Fragments starting at lines 2291, 2985: Non- Primary-Key column(s) [RegionId] are being mapped in both fragments to different conceptual side properties - data inconsistency is possible because the corresponding conceptual side properties can be independently modified. When regenerating ADO.NET Entity Model from scratch these new relationships do appear properly as associations and my project compilation works OK... Etc. All in all I have got my DDEWA working OK but my current "rule of thumb" is to not touch/edit generated ADO.NET Entity Model to not get into trouble. Thank you. -- Shamil -----Original Message----- From: dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Shamil Salakhetdinov Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2009 2:19 PM To: 'Discussion concerning Visual Basic and related programming issues.' Subject: Re: [dba-VB] Dynamic Data Entities Web Applications Hi Gustav, I gave got one issue with DDEWA already - one of the tables "doesn't want" to be opened/viewed - ASP.NET runtime error is reported. No clue yet how to workaround this issue. Isn't that one of the causes Charlotte warned about referring to her manager experience in another company? The tables are ordered alphabetically and I wanted to get them ordered special custom way. Thank you. -- Shamil -----Original Message----- From: dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gustav Brock Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2009 1:26 AM To: dba-vb at databaseadvisors.com Subject: Re: [dba-VB] Dynamic Data Entities Web Applications Hi Shamil Yes, please post your findings please. As for the order of the tables, isn't it just based on the enumeration in SQL Server? /gustav >>> shamil at smsconsulting.spb.ru 21-08-2009 18:07 >>> Hi Gustav -- Yes, I do know that you find ADO.NET Entity Data Model very promising. And I only wanted to note that I find DDEWA also very promising to perform quite some routine work we and our customers/"super-users" are doing manually nowadays. BTW, as far as I see/can guess DDEWA are implemented using very similar to ASP.NET MVC Framework approach: I mean they seems to be using "some tricks" on top of ASP.NET engine to generate on-the-fly ASP.NET controls and web forms and "feed" ASP.NET engine using these generated web forms/controls. I can be wrong. Just guessing... I will continue my R&D with DDEWA and if I find something interesting I will post this information here. BTW, I'm currently trying to customize the order of the list of the tables shown on the first page (Default.aspx) of my DDEWA, any ideas? Thank you. -- Shamil -----Original Message----- From: dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gustav Brock Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009 4:45 PM To: dba-vb at databaseadvisors.com Subject: Re: [dba-VB] Dynamic Data Entities Web Applications Hi Shamil My comments were not on the ADO.NET Entity Data Model which I find very promising. Your example of a "superuser" having access to the schema and full (test) data is what I meant with a admin/techie app which I believe can be useful - only have I never met a client which had much more than just a sense of what the database is about. I agree with you that dynamic data entities web tool seems to be very well engineered. /gustav >>> shamil at smsconsulting.spb.ru 21-08-2009 13:18 >>> Hi Gustav, Yes, it takes "close to zero efforts" (~1 minute) to have a "web application" for this ADO.NET entity model http://shamils-4.hosting.parking.ru/temp/model.jpg which in turn was generated from MS SQL 2005 database. <<< ...this technique has its uses but app development is not one of these... >>> Gustav, let me disagree with that your statement. First of all because (sample) and lookup data entry/edit is in fact part of our everyday real life practice of application development. Second, because Dynamic Data Entity Web Applications (DDEWA) do help developers to verify their data modeling decisions by "effortlessly" giving "working models" in hands of (power-)users, and when users/developers find there are some mistakes in those decisions then DDEWA help to quickly fix those mistakes (as you can see from referred here video you have to just redeploy your corrected db and corresponding .edmx file and then refresh your browser - and you'll get the new version "up & running". This practice of verifying data modeling decisions in real life environment is also our everyday practice but it usually takes much more efforts when done without DDEWA. Third, because as I noted you can prepare within DDEWA ready to use in real apps "code blocks" (.ascx controls etc.) while "playing with" DDEWA (again as you can see no need to rebuild/restart the application - just refresh your browser - well, that is a consequence of ASP.NET technology used for DDEWA) Fourth, as we talked here before, ADO.NET Entity Data Model will allow in the (near) future to generate actual database models from ADO.NET Entity models - wouldn't that become soon our everyday development practice? (Imagine you start from use cases/user stories, develop customs classes and business functionality based on ADO.NET Entity objects, develop unit tests, then generate database model, develop integration tests, generate/customize application interface... - and you're done. (of course I'm simplifying here the real picture but IMO mainstream direction is presented correctly?)) Fifth, as we can see DDEWA user interface is generated from ADO.NET Entity Model and this model (which is currently in the referred above case is simply generated from database model) can be made having "Super-Entities" modeling user interfaces' underplaying data, these "Super-Entities" can have relations used by DDEWA to navigate between them... - IOW this is a way to simulate real life apps user interfaces and navigation, and then "just add" a mapping from "Super-Entities" to database entities... ... DDEWA looks here very challenging and in the same time helpful to our everyday development practices, not a "silver bullet" of course as we're getting more and more complicated business tasks to automate but they (DDEWA) promise to get out "yet another routine everyday work" from the shoulders of developers... Thank you. -- Shamil P.S. The idea of DDEWA to generate user interface doesn't look original - we have seen many "wizard tools" like that (I have even participated in developing tools like that for different platforms, did you?) - but implementation of this idea by MS folks and the ways to (re-)use this implementation for real life apps development look very powerful, useful and challenging from here. My five stars (*****) to MS DDEWA technology developers. -----Original Message----- From: dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gustav Brock Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009 2:27 PM To: dba-vb at databaseadvisors.com Subject: Re: [dba-VB] Dynamic Data Entities Web Applications Hi Shamil and Charlotte I watched that video - some challenge due to the awful soundtrack - and my impression is that this dynamic data entities web is useful only for creating an interface to the complete table schema - which you hardly never use (I haven't) except for the example Shamil describes where you wish to present the full schema as well as the data content and even offer to edit this at close to zero efforts. I could imagine some kind of monitoring or admin/techie interface built this way. For any other purpose a lot of customizing is needed which - though quite powerful, so it seems - for a decent app will take longer than building the app from scratch I guess. So - as I see it - this technique has its uses but app development is not on of these. /gustav