Design-Time Improvements
Most of the wizards and assistance dialogs received a major usability
overhaul in Q1, making the designer not only slicker, but more powerful. Our choice of
underlying technology for the overhaul was WPF to ensure that we will
be able to provide not only vastly better user experience and fresh look
and feel, but extensibility, which will allow us to improve the wizards
in the future (for example to add a built-in help control to guide you
through the wizard). Among the highlights are:
- The Association Editor
has been completely revamped with considerable UI and
functional upgrades. It offers consistent behavior and works not
only for Reverse mapping (as the old one), but for Forward mapping as
well. Double-clicking on an association in the designer will open the
same Association Dialog every time, which means that you will not have
to go to another place to edit associations. What is more, whereas the
previous version of the association editor allowed working with tables
and columns only (relational point of view), the new one will also allow
you to work with classes and properties (objects point of view):
- The new version of the Update from Database Wizard offers a hierarchical treeview which shows ALL database changes
that can be applied to the model right away -- something that was not
possible with the previous version of the wizard. Checkboxes in the
treeview give you the ability to check the items (tables,
stored procedures, etc.) you need updated:
- The Model Settings Dialog and Add New Domain Model Wizard both get better input validation and improved user experience.
Project Upgrade Tool
This super tool now upgrades a wider range of classic OpenAccess projects to the latest OpenAccess Context API. This means that projects created with the classic wizards, regardless of whether they use Forward mapping, Reverse mapping, or both, will be converted.
Fluent Mapping API
The Fluent Mapping API was another major focus for this release, which we are sure that code-only developers and MVC users will appreciate. The updated Fluent API is more stable and covers over 90% of the OpenAccess functionality.
Entity Framework to OpenAccess ORM Project Converter
The project converter from Entity Framework allows you to convert an existing Entity Framework Model to the OpenAccess Domain Model. The converter opens a wizard which will guide you through the conversion process, which takes a few simple steps. A backup of the original project is created, as well as a Conversion Log, which will show you details about the conversion in an easily readable format.