Automatic scaffolding generation for Data Access models?

[Phil]

Telerik is seriously deficient with its Data Access toolset by not providing a way to automatically scaffold controllers and views from models in an MVC project. See, by comparison, what Microsoft now supports for its own native system, Entity Framework - http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/685210/CRUD-Operations-Easy-with-New-Scaffolding-Feature.

I like Telerik's approach generally, and its tools including the data model diagramming, but data isn't created or edited out of thin air. Creating forms is a tedious, repetitive, time consuming (hence money consuming) task. If Telerik isn't going to support scaffolding, it's losing a big edge to Microsoft's own tools, and Data Access becomes significantly less valuable.

I see a lot of desire from various developers for this capability as I searched existing threads, but no indication of a serious effort to make scaffolding a priority. Any comments by Telerik on this?

[Viktor Zhivkov]

Hi Phil,

Thank you for your suggestion!
Speaking from the perspective of Telerik Data Access team, you are the first client to request this feature and you are welcome to post it in our Ideas and Feedback portal. There any of our clients can support your feature request and based on the number of votes we can get better picture what are the needs of the whole Telerik Data Access developer community. 

The frank answer is that currently we are focusing our efforts in improvements of the core runtime of the product and not much in the visual tooling and in the coming months I doubt that we will be shifting our direction.

If you are facing a big CRUD-based project and think you will save time by automating the generation of your controllers and views, we will be happy to assist you with guidance how to implement it.

Regards,
Viktor Zhivkov
Telerik

 

 

[Phil]

The first? How about this, from July 2012? http://www.telerik.com/forums/any-plan-to-add-scaffolding-templates-to-asp-net-mvc-using-kendo

It isn't strictly Data Access but it's a very similar question and concern.

Also, isn't this relevant from your own blog announcement? http://blogs.telerik.com/kendoui/posts/14-12-17/announcing-the-telerik-kendo-ui-q1-2015-roadmap

"On top of that, we’ll be aiming to improve your Visual Studio experience with Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC by delivering scaffolding
capabilities, such as the ability to automatically generate the code plumbing between your data and view layers hosting data-bound Kendo UI MVC wrappers"

[Viktor Zhivkov]

Hello Phil,

I am sorry for the confusion - I am speaking on behalf of the team working on Telerik Data Access, and the posts that you are referring to are related to our Kendo UI product. Our roadmaps currently are not tied together and for good or bad both products are evolving separately.
If Kendo UI team has the scaffolding in their roadmap for Q1 2015, I believe they will deliver it with their official release a bit later this year.

Regards,
Viktor Zhivkov
Telerik

 

 

[Phil]

Viktor - doesn't it bother anyone at Telerik that teams for two major projects are not apparently talking to each other? Why would your team not think about actual use cases for the data, like where it comes from and how it's updated? Is it reasonable to think that console applications with no GUI are the primary consumers of your product? This is the web age. Data needs a GUI to display and edit it, and the GUI needs data providers. I don't see the sense in having two products with a very clear potential for interoperability be completely independently developed, especially within the same organization.

My original point stands - point to anybody who wants to spend the time manually creating and updating CRUD web forms. Scaffolding is a major topic (Google it.) First class support of it means higher demand for your data product, which I assume is seen as beneficial.

[Doroteya]

Hello Phil,

I am sorry about the frustration you are experiencing.

Indeed, there is no out-of-the-box design-time integration between Kendo UI and Data Access.

Currently, the Kendo UI team are planning to release scaffolding for Q1 2015, and it will not include templates that consume Data Access.

On our side (the Data Access team), such a feature was not previously requested, and therefore I created an item about it on our Ideas and Feedback portal. Your vote about it will be appreciated.

Additionally, on the portal the community that uses Data Access will be able to review the request as well, and if it gathers approval, we are going to move it forward for evaluation.

I hope this helps. Thank you for your understanding.


Regards,
Doroteya
Telerik