Extensions for Entity Framework Code First

A couple of months ago I blogged about an extension I wrote to execute a stored procedure more easily with Entity Framework CodeFirst.  It certainly bumped up the number of visitors I got on my blog, which I of course love to see, but it also made me think of so many things that are missing in EF CF.

During my time spend on a project that uses EF CF, I’ve bundled some extensions I wrote to facility my needs and to make developing a whole lot easier.  It surprises me that the Entity Framework team didn’t ship these features in their release. 

Below you’ll find an explanation for every extension I wrote.  The code is on github, so feel free to make any additions as you like.

1.  Executing Stored Procedures

I already wrote an extensive blog post about this one so feel free to read it here.

To  summarize, the extension allows you to execute a stored procedure as so:

var testProcedureStoredProcedure = new TestProcedureStoredProcedure() { Iets = 5, NogIets = true };
var result = DbContext.Database.ExecuteStoredProcedure(testProcedureStoredProcedure);

I’ve made a small addition that now you can decide which class will be used to resolve the stored procedure name: the result class or the stored procedure class.

2.  Map to custom dto’s with ESQL

By default you can only map to entities when using ESQL. If you write your select statement explicitly then you get a DbDataRecord.   This is a PIA when customizing you selects to minimize data transfer.  The extension I wrote can map all selected fields to your dto.

var query = _unitOfWork.CreateQuery<DbDataRecord>(queryString);var dtos  = query.Map<YourDTO>();

3. Retrieve the DbSet with a generic

The datacontext object of EF CF exposes a number of DbSet’s.  I found it quit useful to be able to generically address these DbSet’s.  So I’ve come up with the following solution.  With this extension you can select a DbSet by supplying the type of the entity as a generic.

dataContext.GetDbSetReference<YourEntityType>();

4. Include with lamda

Why on earth they didn’t include this in version 1.0 I have no idea but unless you’ve already wrote your own extension for it (probably!), I’ve included a way to do this in the extensions project also.  Basically it enables you to write:

EntitySet.Include(x => x.NavigationProperty)

So that’s about it.  You can find the code on github.  As I’ve said, I’m happy to accept any useful additions to the code base.

Have fun coding, till next time!