Doing it right.

[Stuart Hemming]

Now, I've come to this product with little (read: no) experience of this kind of tool, what it does or how it does it.

I'm familiar with n-tier development and have worked in n-tier environments that were created by someone else with no problem. I know what my DAL and BLL should be doing and why.

I've seen a couple of OA examples that seem to be using an n-tier approach, but, and this is more to do with me I think, I'll be [expletive deleted] if I can follow 'em!

Is there anyone out there prepared to receive my eternal gratitude and explain to me the process of generating an n-tier model? One with a Data access layer and a Business Logic layer and the process, using OA, for communicating between the 2?

Currently, I have a model that was generated using the forward-mapping wizard, but I think that that particular horse has been retired once and for all, so I'm happy to recreate my model using the flavour du jour if I can find the right spell so that I don't have to go through this again.

[Jordan]

Hello Stuart Hemming,

I am happy  to let you know that we have already started working on a series of help topics and examples that will guide our customers that are doing n-tier development with OpenAccess. This guide will cover multiple service and UI technologies and will probably be ready for the Q3 2010 release of OpenAccess.

Until then I suggest that you take a look at the following code library project:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/orm/general/northwind-wcf-n-tier-demo-application.aspx

And you could also use  the AutoMapper project in order to make persistent object to business object mapping easier:
http://automapper.codeplex.com/

Regarding your forward mapped model and the old wizards:
Obviously we are changing the direction of development of OpenAccess towards the visual designer and the context.
You must have in mind however, that this change will not happen overnight and although the old reverse and forward mapping wizards are not available from the OpenAccess menu by default they are still accessible if you need them.
In order to help our customers migrate their projects we introduced the upgrade tool. However, currently this tool can only migrate reverse mapped models (created with the reverse mapping wizard). We plan to implement migration of forward mapped projects for the Q3 2010 release of OpenAccess.

Depending on the state of your project I suggest the following:
1. if your project already is running in production, I suggest that you continue using the forward mapping wizard, at least until the upgrade tool can migrate these kinds of projects
2. if you are starting a new project, I suggest that you use the visual designer

I hope this answers some of your questions.
Do not hesitate to write again if you have more.

Sincerely yours,
Jordan
the Telerik team