Saturday, July 02, 2011

Entity Framework – Model First: Generating DDL for Complex Types

In the model below the phone number for an artist is actually a complex type (a little over engineered, I know, but I was just exploring how well this works).

The complex type consists of 4 ‘fields’: CountryCode, AreaCode, Number and Extension:

Each ‘field’ has properties set:

The great part is that this is fully supported by the DDL generator, so right click on the Entity Framework Designer in Visual Studio 2010 and choose ‘Generate Database From Model…’ and the ‘Artist’ table will be generated as:

-- --------------------------------------------------

-- Entity Designer DDL Script for SQL Server 2005, 2008, and Azure

-- --------------------------------------------------

-- --------------------------------------------------

-- Creating all tables

-- --------------------------------------------------

-- Creating table 'Artists'

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Artists] (

    [Id] int IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,

    [Name] nvarchar(100)  NOT NULL,

    [IsIndividual] bit  NOT NULL,

    [Phone_CountryCode] nvarchar(4)  NOT NULL,

    [Phone_AreaCode] nvarchar(5)  NOT NULL,

    [Phone_Number] nvarchar(10)  NOT NULL,

    [Phone_Extension] nvarchar(10)  NULL

);

GO

-- <snip other tables>

-- --------------------------------------------------

-- Creating all PRIMARY KEY constraints

-- --------------------------------------------------

-- Creating primary key on [Id] in table 'Artists'

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Artists]

ADD CONSTRAINT [PK_Artists]

    PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([Id] ASC);

GO

-- <snip other primary and foreign key>

-- --------------------------------------------------

-- Script has ended

-- --------------------------------------------------

Notice that by default each column is prefixed with the name of the complex type, this is of course needed to ensure column names stay unique across multiple complex types in a single entity.

.NET | C# | Entity Framework | Visual Studio 2010

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