This will apply mostly for an asp.net application where the data is not accessed via soa. Meaning that you get access to the objects loaded from the framework, not Transfer Objects, although some recommendation still apply.
This is a community post, so please add to it as you see fit.
Applies to: Entity Framework 1.0 shipped with Visual Studio 2008 sp1.
Why pick EF in the first place?
Considering it is a young technology with plenty of problems (see below), it may be a hard sell to get on the EF bandwagon for your project. However, it is the technology Microsoft is pushing (at the expense of Linq2Sql, which is a subset of EF). In addition, you may not be satisfied with NHibernate or other solutions out there. Whatever the reasons, there are people out there (including me) working with EF and life is not bad.make you think.
EF and inheritance
The first big subject is inheritance. EF does support mapping for inherited classes that are persisted in 2 ways: table per class and table the hierarchy. The modeling is easy and there are no programming issues with that part.
(The following applies to table per class model as I don't have experience with table per hierarchy, which is, anyway, limited.) The real problem comes when you are trying to run queries that include one or many objects that are part of an inheritance tree: the generated sql is incredibly awful, takes a long time to get parsed by the EF and takes a long time to execute as well. This is a real show stopper. Enough that EF should probably not be used with inheritance or as little as possible.
Here is an example of how bad it was. My EF model had ~30 classes, ~10 of which were part of an inheritance tree. On running a query to get one item from the Base class, something as simple as Base.Get(id), the generated SQL was over 50,000 characters. Then when you are trying to return some Associations, it degenerates even more, going as far as throwing SQL exceptions about not being able to query more than 256 tables at once.
Ok, this is bad, EF concept is to allow you to create your object structure without (or with as little as possible) consideration on the actual database implementation of your table. It completely fails at this.
So, recommendations? Avoid inheritance if you can, the performance will be so much better. Use it sparingly where you have to. In my opinion, this makes EF a glorified sql-generation tool for querying, but there are still advantages to using it. And ways to implement mechanism that are similar to inheritance.
Bypassing inheritance with Interfaces
First thing to know with trying to get some kind of inheritance going with EF is that you cannot assign a non-EF-modeled class a base class. Don't even try it, it will get overwritten by the modeler. So what to do?
You can use interfaces to enforce that classes implement some functionality. For example here is a IEntity interface that allow you to define Associations between EF entities where you don't know at design time what the type of the entity would be.
public enum EntityTypes{ Unknown = -1, Dog = 0, Cat }
public interface IEntity
{
int EntityID { get; }
string Name { get; }
Type EntityType { get; }
}
public partial class Dog : IEntity
{
// implement EntityID and Name which could actually be fields
// from your EF model
Type EntityType{ get{ return EntityTypes.Dog; } }
}
Using this IEntity, you can then work with undefined associations in other classes
// lets take a class that you defined in your model.
// that class has a mapping to the columns: PetID, PetType
public partial class Person
{
public IEntity GetPet()
{
return IEntityController.Get(PetID,PetType);
}
}
which makes use of some extension functions:
public class IEntityController
{
static public IEntity Get(int id, EntityTypes type)
{
switch (type)
{
case EntityTypes.Dog: return Dog.Get(id);
case EntityTypes.Cat: return Cat.Get(id);
default: throw new Exception("Invalid EntityType");
}
}
}
Not as neat as having plain inheritance, particularly considering you have to store the PetType in an extra database field, but considering the performance gains, I would not look back.
It also cannot model one-to-many, many-to-many relationship, but with creative uses of 'Union' it could be made to work. Finally, it creates the side effet of loading data in a property/function of the object, which you need to be careful about. Using a clear naming convention like GetXYZ() helps in that regards.
Compiled Queries
Entity Framework performance is not as good as direct database access with ADO (obviously) or Linq2SQL. There are ways to improve it however, one of which is compiling your queries. The performance of a compiled query is similar to Linq2Sql.
What is a compiled query? It is simply a query for which you tell the framework to keep the parsed tree in memory so it doesn't need to be regenerated the next time you run it. So the next run, you will save the time it takes to parse the tree. Do not discount that as it is a very costly operation that gets even worse with more complex queries.
There are 2 ways to compile a query: creating an ObjectQuery with EntitySQL and using CompiledQuery.Compile() function. (Note that by using an EntityDataSource in your page, you will in fact be using ObjectQuery with EntitySQL, so that gets compiled and cached).
An aside here in case you don't know what EntitySQL is. It is a string-based way of writing queries against the EF. Here is an example: "select value dog from Entities.DogSet as dog where dog.ID = @ID". The syntax is pretty similar to SQL syntax. You can also do pretty complex object manipulation, which is well explained [here][1].
Ok, so here is how to do it using ObjectQuery<>
string query = "select value dog " +
"from Entities.DogSet as dog " +
"where dog.ID = @ID";
ObjectQuery<Dog> oQuery = new ObjectQuery<Dog>(query, EntityContext.Instance));
oQuery.Parameters.Add(new ObjectParameter("ID", id));
oQuery.EnablePlanCaching = true;
return oQuery.FirstOrDefault();
The first time you run this query, the framework will generate the expression tree and keep it in memory. So the next time it gets executed, you will save on that costly step. In that example EnablePlanCaching = true, which is unnecessary since that is the default option.
The other way to compile a query for later use is the CompiledQuery.Compile method. This uses a delegate:
static readonly Func<Entities, int, Dog> query_GetDog =
CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, Dog>((ctx, id) =>
ctx.DogSet.FirstOrDefault(it => it.ID == id));
or using linq
static readonly Func<Entities, int, Dog> query_GetDog =
CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, Dog>((ctx, id) =>
(from dog in ctx.DogSet where dog.ID == id select dog).FirstOrDefault());
to call the query:
query_GetDog.Invoke( YourContext, id );
The advantage of CompiledQuery is that the syntax of your query is checked at compile time, where as EntitySQL is not. However, there are other consideration...
Includes
Lets say you want to have the data for the dog owner to be returned by the query to avoid making 2 calls to the database. Easy to do, right?
EntitySQL
string query = "select value dog " +
"from Entities.DogSet as dog " +
"where dog.ID = @ID";
ObjectQuery<Dog> oQuery = new ObjectQuery<Dog>(query, EntityContext.Instance)).Include("Owner");
oQuery.Parameters.Add(new ObjectParameter("ID", id));
oQuery.EnablePlanCaching = true;
return oQuery.FirstOrDefault();
CompiledQuery
static readonly Func<Entities, int, Dog> query_GetDog =
CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, Dog>((ctx, id) =>
(from dog in ctx.DogSet.Include("Owner") where dog.ID == id select dog).FirstOrDefault());
Now, what if you want to have the Include parametrized? What I mean is that you want to have a single Get() function that is called from different pages that care about different relationships for the dog. One cares about the Owner, another about his FavoriteFood, another about his FavotireToy and so on. Basicly, you want to tell the query which associations to load.
It is easy to do with EntitySQL
public Dog Get(int id, string include)
{
string query = "select value dog " +
"from Entities.DogSet as dog " +
"where dog.ID = @ID";
ObjectQuery<Dog> oQuery = new ObjectQuery<Dog>(query, EntityContext.Instance))
.IncludeMany(include);
oQuery.Parameters.Add(new ObjectParameter("ID", id));
oQuery.EnablePlanCaching = true;
return oQuery.FirstOrDefault();
}
The include simply uses the passed string. Easy enough. Note that it is possible to improve on the Include(string) function (that accepts only a single path) with an IncludeMany(string) that will let you pass a string of comma-separated associations to load. Look further in the extension section for this function.
If we try to do it with CompiledQuery however, we run into numerous problems:
The obvious
static readonly Func<Entities, int, string, Dog> query_GetDog =
CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, string, Dog>((ctx, id, include) =>
(from dog in ctx.DogSet.Include(include) where dog.ID == id select dog).FirstOrDefault());
will choke when called with:
query_GetDog.Invoke( YourContext, id, "Owner,FavoriteFood" );
Because, as mentionned above, Include() only wants to see a single path in the string and here we are giving it 2: "Owner" and "FavoriteFood" (which is not to be confused with "Owner.FavoriteFood"!).
Then, let's use IncludeMany(), which is an extension function
static readonly Func<Entities, int, string, Dog> query_GetDog =
CompiledQuery.Compile<Entities, int, string, Dog>((ctx, id, include) =>
(from dog in ctx.DogSet.IncludeMany(include) where dog.ID == id select dog).FirstOrDefault());
Wrong again, this time it is because the EF cannot parse IncludeMany because it is not part of the functions that is recognizes: it is an extension.
Ok, so you want to pass an arbitrary number of paths to your function and Includes() only takes a single one. What to do? You could decide that you will never ever need more than, say 20 Includes, and pass each separated strings in a struct to CompiledQuery. But now the query looks like this:
from dog in ctx.DogSet.Include(include1).Include(include2).Include(include3)
.Include(include4).Include(include5).Include(include6)
.[...].Include(include19).Include(include20) where dog.ID == id select dog
which is awful as well. Ok, then, but wait a minute. Can't we return an ObjectQuery<> with CompiledQuery?
