As explained in previous posts, CodeFluent Entities is way more that an ORM: you’re not just mapping classes to database objects, instead you’re creating a model which will be translated into stuff. Therefore if you add persistence producers such as SQL Server, Oracle Database or SQL Azure a database will be created or updated from it (see continuous generation from more info).
Creating a database implies naming a lot of stuff: tables, columns, constraints, stored procedures, etc., so I thought I’d give you a little details on how it works and how you can control this to create your own database.
First, CodeFluent Entities deduces names automatically from your model:
- Table names are identical to entity names,
- Columns are named “<EntityName>_<PropertyName>”,
- Procedures are named “<EntityName>_<MethodName>”
Users can override this logic by:
- defining a “Persistence Name” in the Property Grid on the object you want to change (entity, property, method, view, ..)
- setting a “Persistence Property Name Format” at the project level to customize all property names of your project (e.g. replace the default “{0}_{1}” by “{1}” to remove the entity name prefix from all column names),
- changing the naming convention
In practice a naming convention is a class implementing a naming convention rule which CodeFluent Entities will use to name persistence objects. Consequently changing the naming convention used will change the way all objects are named.
Several naming conventions are provided out-of-the-box and they all derive from one another, hence they benefit from the features of their parents. The hierarchy is as follows:
- BaseNamingConvention (default)
- FormatNamingConvention: modifies the name format of tables, columns, procedures, parameters, constraints.
- LowerCaseNamingConvention: sets all database object names in lower case.
- UpperCaseNamingConvention: sets all database object names in upper case.
- DecamelizeNamingConvention: decamelizes all names (FirstName –> First_Name)
- DecamelizeLowerCaseNamingConvention: all in lower case and decamelized (FirstName –> first_name)
- DecamelizeUpperCaseNamingConvention: all in upper case and decamelized (FirstName –> FIRST_NAME)
Furthermore you can create your own custom naming convention by implementing the INamingConvention or by deriving from existing ones.
Cheers,
Carl Anderson
