Visual Studio Integration

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The OpenAccess ORM Visual Studio integration is designed to provide you with maximum guidance when creating and maintaining your OpenAccess-enabled applications. It includes a set of designers, wizards and tools, which are intuitive, familiar and easy to use, and which make model management intuitive and quick.


Visual Model Designer

The OpenAccess Visual Designer is a visual tool integrated in Visual Studio that enables point-and-click modification of your domain model, such as create and modify entities, associations, mappings, and inheritance relationships. It also helps you validate the domain model. The Visual Designer consists of a design surface and several editors and tools for viewing and editing your mappings, and creating objects, associations, and inheritance relationships.


Visual Studio Project Templates 

To make it easier to get an application up and running in Visual Studio, Telerik OpenAccess ORM offer several projects templates (.NET3.5+) to help you get started. The project templates will create the following OpenAccess-enabled projects and files for you: ASP.NET Web Site, ASP.NET Ajax Web ApplicationClass LibraryFluent Library (for code-first developers), and MVC2 Application. You can bring the story one step further with the Telerik OpenAccess Dynamic Data Application project template. Utilizing its capabilities you won't have to do any additional setup in order to start creating your data-driven application.


Create Model Wizard (Database-first Mapping)

The OpenAccess Create Model Wizard will auto-generate your domain model together with a source code file (C# or VB.NET) from an existing database in minutes. In the process it lets you choose which tables, views, and/or stored procedures to include in the domain model. You can control various aspects of the model creation, such as naming rules and default namespace.


Update Database from Model Wizard (for Model-first Mapping)

This wizard allows you to do the conceptual modeling first and then to create a database that supports the domain model. It will generate the schema definition script for creating (or the schema migration script for migrating) a database from an existing conceptual model.


One Minute Fluent API Code Generation

Many of our Fluent API fans are working in a Database First scenario where the database is already designed, and they need to add the entire mapping by coding. While this is doable with dozens of tables, it is not so easy if you have hundreds of them. As one of our main goals is saving you time and making your life easier, we developed a mix of Code-only and Database-first approaches which allow you to generate all of your Fluent code automatically as it is done with the Visual Designer models. At the same time, since the generated code contains Fluent API declarations, you can benefit from the capabilities this API is offering for modifying and extending the mapping.


Update Model from Database Wizard

This wizard is used to update your domain model after changes have been made to the underlying database. It shows the difference between the database content and the model in terms of what tables/columns/views/objects have been added, changed or deleted in the database, and gives you the ability to choose what actions to take for each in order to update the model.


Data Services Wizard (for Web Services)

The Telerik Data Services Wizard is tremendous time-saver, because it automatically generates the C# or VB.NET code and all necessary project files for using OpenAccess entities with many web services, saving the developer time and eliminating syntax errors and possible issues if done by hand. The Data Services Wizard can also create a Silverlight application to consume the CRUD operations for selected entities in the project. The supported services are WCF RIA Services, WCF Data Services, Open Data (OData) Protocol, WCF Endpoint (Plain) Services, REST Collection WCF Services, and ATOM Publishing Protocol WCF Services.


Stored Procedures Editor

The Stored Procedures Editor simplifies the setup and use of stored procedures in OpenAccess ORM applications. When a stored procedure is included in the domain model, you could create a function (method) that returns a single scalar value, a collection of the Persistent Types, or Complex Types, or no value by using this Editor. Adding a function allows you to call the corresponding stored procedure from your code. The information created from Stored Procedure Editor is passed directly to the code generation engine, and the corresponding complex types and methods are generated. The Editor utilizes the ADO.NET-like low level API of OpenAccess which gives you fast access to your data through the stored procedure.


Batch Operations Dialog for Modifying Your Model at Once

OpenAccess ORM supports Batch Operations which allow you to update your model in a few clicks. This is done through a simple dialog, which enables you to:

  • Update many (or all) classes and properties using a configurable batch operation, such as changing class namespaces, changing property types, etc.
  • Speed up the process of making changes in class and property names by presenting them in a data grid.
  • Always have a good reference for the current state of your model using a grid-based overview.

Testability

All classes enhanced by Telerik's .Net ORM are still normal CLR objects, and as such can be easily tested by state of the art unit tests. Moreover, SQL code can be traced by writing it to the console, in a text file or to the .NET tracing framework. Performance counters show you the state of your running application, website or application server.


Convert Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL Models to OpenAccess

The Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL Conversion Wizards allow you to convert the corresponding data model to a Telerik OpenAccess Domain Model. The wizard is quick and easy to use.


Project Upgrade Tool

This tool helps you upgrade projects which use previous versions of Telerik OpenAccess ORM to the newest version.


Helper Tools, Browsers, and Setting Dialogs

OpenAccess ORM provides many more Visual Studio tools to help you and guide you when working with the your models:

  • RIA Services Wizard
  • Association Editor
  • Domain Context Wizard
  • Enable Project Wizard
  • Expert Enable Wizard
  • Dynamic Data Wizard
  • OpenAccess RIA Wizard 
  • Domain Context Wizard
  • Backend Configuration
  • Check Settings
  • FetchPlan Browser
  • OQL Query Browser
  • Metadata Properties
  • ItemType Wizard
  • Data Form Wizard
  • IObjectContext Provider
  • Reverse Engineering Wizard