dbschema.exe

Owned by reinhard reinhard (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jan 21, 2010Version comment
2 min read

dbschema.exe inspects domain object assemblies to find domain object classes, their properties and attributes and generates the database schema - tables and views.

As the PhoneBook tutorial explains, a domain object class essentially is a set of properties (and attributes). Here is the sample Person class from the PhoneBook tutorial:

public class Person : DomainObject
{
    [StringProperty(MaximumLength=60)]
    public virtual string FirstName { get; set; }

    [StringProperty(MaximumLength=60, IsNullable=false)]
    public virtual string Surname { get; set; }

    public virtual Location Location { get; set; }
    
    [DBBidirectionalRelation("Person", SortExpression="CountryCode, AreaCode, Number, Extension")]    
    public virtual ObjectList<PhoneNumber> PhoneNumbers { get; set; }
}

From such a declaration, dbschema.exe generates a table and a view for persisting Person objects. As you see in the illustration, the correspondence between class and table/view can be quite simple. In this case, the columns for Person table and PersonView view look exactly alike:

Not all cases are so simple, however. Persistence with re-store is discussed in FIXME. That page also answers the question why the PhoneNumbers column is missing from the table/view shown above. (Just in case you wondered.)

See also