Generate EF stored proc methods from command line

Question

I'm using EntityFramework 6 in VS2013 with database-first. When you pull in the database, you can get stored procedures, which builds methods into your context for each proc, as well as classes for each of the return types which it derives from the procedures.

I'm looking for a way to run this from the command line. The closest I can find is EdmGen, but this apparently does only tables.

I've seen EfGen, but aside from this just being a download from some guy with no source code or peer review, it appears to be at least one version behind.

Building the names and parameters of the methods is easy enough - I could do that myself with the SQL Server metadata - however, building the result classes would be tricker, so ideally I'd like to do whatever VS is doing.

Is there an SDK command or something I can pull from Visual Studio to do this on demand? I often have to re-pull my procs (early in the development process so things are constantly changing), and it's a hassle to do it in the UI.

Answer 1

I don't think what you are trying to do is possible from the command line. As you noticed in the EF6 Designer there is no public API for reverse engineering similar to the one exposed by EdmGen. The lack of the API is not actually the biggest problem here - in general models generated by EdmGen and the new designer are semantically the same - the only difference is that in EF6 two new provider manifest tokens were introduced for SqlServer - 2012 for Sql Server 2012 and 2012.Azure for Sql Azure. You will get these provider manifest tokens when targeting the above databases with the new designer but when using EdmGen you will get 2008. The actual problem here (and the reason why EdmGen does not support generating/importing store functions) is that in the EF provider model there is no way to get the description of the results returned by a store function. To make up for this the designer uses the DDEX provider which is able to return the description of the first result set (now, you also know why the EF Designer does not support stored procedures returning multiple resultsets even though it is supported by the runtime) returned by a store function. Since DDEX is basically a VS thing I don't think you will be able to import store functions from command line using out-of-the-box tooling.