I start using OpenAccess as it was invited by Vanatec long before it was sold to Telerik.
The absolute premium feature is (was?) the ability to start with an object model and automatically create the database structure. You only have to use one tool, and dont have to deal with DDL, SQL or wathever. Even when you have to change something, the changes were reflected in a script and automatically applied to your development db, later on used to upgrade the customers installations.
Now I start reading about the new Data Designer and Domain Model and ...
As far as I can see, I have to handcraft my database and than use 'New OpenAccess' to get an object model.
Can me somebody tell why this is an advance? I also can use Microsofts Entity Framework, which I get without additional costs as part of VS2010, so why using 'New OpenAccess' ?
Or were there some plans to support the marvelous 'objects first' approach some day with the new stuff, which makes 'Classical OpenAccess' so outstanding of the crowd of many dozends of mappers I evaluated more or less?
Hope you don't kill the product in the future.
Or do I just miss some importent parts during reading the documentation ? (Hope so!!)
Thanks a lot.
With best regards
DI Gerhard Kreuzer
1 Answer, 1 is accepted
Firstly, let me tell you that the object first feature which you find so useful is still present. It is available when you change the menu entries and choose to work with the classic approach. We are investing efforts in the new visual designer but it is a different approach. Your object model is defined graphically in the design surface – you actually create a bird’s eye view of the object model together with the relationships you want to introduce. We display the generated SQL in a forward mapping scenario with the Update schema wizard because we want the user to consciously modify the database - we prepare the script and let the user change some of the statements to their liking. If you do not want to care about SQL you simply execute the script.
What we offer and are improving with every distribution is our database support. We are also constantly upgrading our LINQ implementation which does not care whether the database vendor is MS SQL Server or Oracle. We are offering a rich collection of examples which we will extend for Q3 and we will distribute a specially designed SDK to manage example solutions. With regard to the visual designer we offer a richer mapping details editor and model settings customization. We are working towards adding features which will ease the management of large models – for instance we will add filtering and searching. We are also extending inheritance scenarios. Currently a lot of effort is also put on the Fluent Mapping API and more improvements for the Fetch Optimization API are on our roadmap. Last but not least, we offer support and can help you resolve any problems you encounter on the way to building your applications.
Greetings,Petko_I
the Telerik team