Entity Framework + POCO

Question

I am building a WPF application using the MVVM pattern. Our stack looks like this:

SQL Server 2008 -> Entity Framework

We use StructureMap for dependency injection to inject our DataFactory which essentially does the CRUD for our POCO business objects.

The ViewModels use the DataFactory for CRUD and the xaml is data bound to the properties in the POCO's.

The whole thing works great but the only thing I find to be somewhat of an annoyance is in the data factory. We copy each property from the EF Object to the POCO one on select and the reverse on update/insert.

Is there any way to automate this process like Fluent does for NHibernate but with the Entity Framework?

Here is a sample insert method in the data factory:

public void InsertCustomer(ref Manager.Model.Customer businessObject)
{
    var mgr = new Manager.Data.PersonData.PersonContext();

    var person = new Manager.Data.PersonData.Person();
    var customer = new Manager.Data.PersonData.Customer();

    customer.Comments = businessObject.Comments;
    customer.Company = businessObject.Company;
    customer.IsBusiness = businessObject.IsBusiness;
    customer.IsCompleted = businessObject.IsCompleted;
    customer.ModifiedBy = "someone";
    customer.ModifiedOn = DateTime.Now;
    customer.CreatedBy = "someone";
    customer.CreatedOn = DateTime.Now;

    person.Customer.Add(customer);
    person.FirstName = businessObject.FirstName;
    person.LastName = businessObject.LastName;
    person.Birthday = businessObject.Birthday;
    person.CreatedBy = "someone";
    person.CreatedOn = DateTime.Now;
    person.Gender = businessObject.Gender;
    person.MiddleInitial = businessObject.MiddleInitial;
    person.ModifiedBy = "someone";
    person.ModifiedOn = DateTime.Now;
    person.Nickname = businessObject.Nickname;
    person.Picture = "";
    person.Suffix = businessObject.Suffix;
    person.Title = businessObject.Title;

    mgr.AddToPeople(person);
    mgr.SaveChanges();
}

It would be nice to declare some class, like Fluent does it:

public class CatMap : ClassMap<Cat>  
{  
  public CatMap()  
  {  
    Id(x => x.Id);  
    Map(x => x.Name)  
      .WithLengthOf(16)  
      .Not.Nullable();  
    Map(x => x.Sex);  
    References(x => x.Mate);  
    HasMany(x => x.Kittens);  
  }  
}

Finally my insert method would look like this:

public void InsertCustomer(ref Manager.Model.Customer businessObject)
{
    var mgr = new Manager.Data.PersonData.PersonContext();

    var person = new Manager.Data.PersonData.Person();
    var customer = new Manager.Data.PersonData.Customer();

    Something.Map(person, businessObject);
    Something.Map(customer, businessObject);  

    person.Customer.Add(customer);

    mgr.AddToPeople(newCustomer);
    mgr.SaveChanges();
}

Essentially I would eliminate the code to move data from the business object to the entity frame work object it would be done once in the mapping class and would not have to be repeated for each method.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can try Automapper, works for me.

http://www.codeplex.com/AutoMapper