Ruurd Boeke Enterprise development and technobabble

Thursday, March 27, 2008

[important: this post belongs to a whole host of other posts. Basically it's about my efforts of building a light-weight n-tier disconnected solution for Entity Framework]

Another status update. I've worked on connecting up a clean graph to a EntityFramework context and found it far from straight-forward! I ended up with very little code though, which is a good sign.

The approach of not serializing the object context, makes it harder to figure out when an object was added or removed. On the client, I keep copies of the 'original' collection and I compare the new collection with the old collection. Problem there is that it's quite possible that an object was just removed from a collection and added to another collection. How do we know we have to do a real 'delete' on it?
I have not yet figured this out ;-)

Here is some code for you to look at:

  0    Customer c = new Customer { Name = "Ruurd Boeke" };
  1    Car car1 = new Car { Make = "Saab", Customer = c };
  2    Order order1 = new Order { Amount = 2, Customer = c };
  3 
  4 
  5    IEditableBusinessObject eC = c as IEditableBusinessObject;
  6    string MsgOnWire = "";
  7 
  8    // at this point, we are not at all attached
  9    using (SimpleRelationshipTestEntities context = new SimpleRelationshipTestEntities())
  10    {
  11     context.AddToCustomer(c);
  12     context.SaveChanges();  // this instructs context to start changetracking
  13 
  14     ((IContextAware)c).CreateSerializableState(context);
  15 
  16     DataContractSerializer s = new DataContractSerializer(c.GetType(), null, int.MaxValue, false, false, new SubstituteDomainDataContractSurrogate());
  17 
  18     MsgOnWire = s.GetWellFormedToContract(c);
  19    }
  20 

The message on the wire looks like this:

<CustomerSurrogate xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="myNamespace">

    <Cars>

        <Car>

            <CarID>244</CarID>

            <Customer>

                <SerializationID>0</SerializationID>

            </Customer>

            <Make>Saab</Make>

            <SerializationID>1</SerializationID>

            <OriginalValue_CarID>244</OriginalValue_CarID>

            <OriginalValue_Customer>

                <SerializationID>0</SerializationID>

            </OriginalValue_Customer>

            <OriginalValue_Make>Saab</OriginalValue_Make>

        </Car>

    </Cars>

    <CustomerID>152</CustomerID>

    <Name>Ruurd Boeke</Name>

    <Orders>

        <Order>

            <Amount>2</Amount>

            <Customer>

                <SerializationID>0</SerializationID>

            </Customer>

            <OrderID>159</OrderID>

            <SerializationID>2</SerializationID>

            <OriginalValue_Amount>2</OriginalValue_Amount>

            <OriginalValue_Customer>

                <SerializationID>0</SerializationID>

            </OriginalValue_Customer>

            <OriginalValue_OrderID>159</OriginalValue_OrderID>

        </Order>

    </Orders>

    <SerializationID>0</SerializationID>

    <OriginalValue_Cars>

        <Car>

            <SerializationID>1</SerializationID>

        </Car>

    </OriginalValue_Cars>

    <OriginalValue_CustomerID>152</OriginalValue_CustomerID>

    <OriginalValue_Name>Ruurd Boeke</OriginalValue_Name>

    <OriginalValue_Orders>

        <Order>

            <SerializationID>2</SerializationID>

        </Order>

    </OriginalValue_Orders>

</CustomerSurrogate>

Next step is to receive this xml on the client, deserialize it and change some stuff:

  0    DataContractSerializer s2 = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(CustomerClient), null, int.MaxValue, false, false, new SubstituteDomainDataContractSurrogate());
  1    CustomerClient c2 = (CustomerClient)s2.UnwrapFromString(MsgOnWire);
  2 
  3    // delete
  4    c2.Cars.First().Customer = null;
  5    c2.Cars.Clear();
  6 
  7    // add
  8    OrderClient order2 = new OrderClient { Amount = 100, Customer = c2 };
  9    c2.Orders.Add(order2);
  10 
  11    // change
  12    c2.Name = "Changed";
  13 
  14    // we have edited everything, let's get back to the server
  15    DataContractSerializer s3 = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(CustomerClient), null, int.MaxValue, false, false, new SubstituteDomainDataContractSurrogate());
  16    MsgOnWire = s3.GetWellFormedToContract(c2);

This client is removing the cars. Note that we do not get the automatic hookup of relations that we used to get on the server: there is no EF Relationship manager on the client!

<CustomerSurrogate xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="myNamespace">

    <Cars />

    <CustomerID>152</CustomerID>

    <Name>Changed</Name>

    <Orders>

        <Order>

            <Amount>2</Amount>

            <Customer>

                <SerializationID>0</SerializationID>

            </Customer>

            <OrderID>159</OrderID>

            <SerializationID>1</SerializationID>

            <OriginalValue_Amount>2</OriginalValue_Amount>

            <OriginalValue_Customer>

                <SerializationID>0</SerializationID>

            </OriginalValue_Customer>

            <OriginalValue_OrderID>159</OriginalValue_OrderID>

        </Order>

        <Order>

            <Amount>100</Amount>

            <Customer>

                <SerializationID>0</SerializationID>

            </Customer>

            <SerializationID>2</SerializationID>

        </Order>

    </Orders>

    <SerializationID>0</SerializationID>

    <OriginalValue_Cars>

        <Car>

            <CarID>244</CarID>

            <Make>Saab</Make>

            <SerializationID>3</SerializationID>

            <OriginalValue_CarID>244</OriginalValue_CarID>

            <OriginalValue_Customer>

                <SerializationID>0</SerializationID>

            </OriginalValue_Customer>

            <OriginalValue_Make>Saab</OriginalValue_Make>

        </Car>

    </OriginalValue_Cars>

    <OriginalValue_CustomerID>152</OriginalValue_CustomerID>

    <OriginalValue_Name>Ruurd Boeke</OriginalValue_Name>

    <OriginalValue_Orders>

        <Order>

            <SerializationID>1</SerializationID>

        </Order>

    </OriginalValue_Orders>

</CustomerSurrogate>

We see that there are no current cars, but the original value of cars still has them. That is how I figure out to delete the cars on the server.
Did you also notice how the new order does not have a ID assigned? The server will take care of it.

  0    // we're at the server
  1    using (SimpleRelationshipTestEntities context = new SimpleRelationshipTestEntities())
  2    {
  3     DataContractSerializer s4 = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Customer), null, int.MaxValue, false, false, new SubstituteDomainDataContractSurrogate());
  4     Customer c3 = (Customer)s4.UnwrapFromString(MsgOnWire);
  5 
  6     ((IContextAware)c3).AttachGraphToContext(context,
  7      delegate(object source)
  8      {
  9       return source.GetType().Name;   // our setnames correspond to our classname. 
  10      });
  11 
  12 
  13     context.SaveChanges();
  14    }

Now, we're deserializing and attaching the graph to the context. The delete on line 7 is a way of returning entitysetnames. EF needs to know the entitysetname to be able to attach an object to a context, but there is no way for me to know it. So at this point I let you make the decision yourself.

The database is correctly filled and we are happy.

Now, I really want to check in this source, but there is a lot to be done still. The API I have created is monstrous.
Also, I think there are quite a few situations where this will break horribly.

Once I get just a little happier about it, I will do a screencast building a server using Entity Framework and a silverlight client that is editing.