New Versions of dotConnect ADO.NET Providers with Improved Entity Developer Are
Available!
December 09, 2011
Devart is glad to announce the release of the new versions of ADO.NET data providers,
enhanced database connectivity solutions, built over the ADO.NET architecture, that
support Entity Framework and LinqConnect ORM solutions. New versions of dotConnect
data providers offer you new improved Entity Developer 4.2 and enhanced Entity Framework
support.
Entity Developer Improvements
The new version of Entity Developer offers you a number of options to configure
Entity Developer appearance and behaviour in the new Options dialog box and advanced
support for entity property validation.
This dialog box allows you to tweak rules for mapping database data types to .NET
types for different databases. It provides great flexibility of data type mappings.
You can create, edit, or delete rules for each data type and even create subrules
for different type precision, scale, or length values. For example, by default number(1)
is mapped to bool type, however you may want to map it to the int type. Now you
can easily map this data type as you prefer. The new dialog box is available from
the Tools menu.
In addition, now Entity Developer provides advanced suppport for entity property
validation. It supports Enterprise Library, NHibernate Validator, and Data Annotations
validation frameworks. Entity Developer eliminates the need to manually place the
validation attributes in the generated code. You just need to select the preferred
validation framework and set validation parameters, such as max value, min value,
max length, min length, regular expression, or to select one of the predefined property
formats. After this Entity Developer will generate validation attributes for entity
properties in the generated code. Later you may choose another validation framework,
and Entity Developer will generate correct validation attributes for the new framework
automatically.
The new Options dialog box also allows you to set custom keyboard shortcuts for
the most often performed operations in Entity Developer and specify the default
appearance and printing settings for your project diagrams.
Entity Framework Support Improvements
In the new versions of Devart dotConnect ADO.NET providers for Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL,
and SQLite we have changed behaviour of the Database.Delete code-first method to
disable constraints when deleting database object and added more options to manage
LIKE behaviour when using Linq to Entities extention methods .Contains() .EndsWith()
.StartsWith(). In addition, dotConnect for Oracle now supports BOOLEAN parameters
of stored procedures in Entity Data Model Wizard.
If you need another feature in Entity Developer or Entity Framework support, visit
our forum at UserVoice and vote for suggested
features or suggest your own one.
If you wish to provide feedback on the new versions, you can do it in our forums or with contact form.
There is also a feedback form in the support zone of every product. We are always
glad to hear your comments and take into account your development needs.