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Wilson ORMapper Forums : Templates & More : ORHelper for vistaDB

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11/24/2005 6:20:42 PM

Hi, does anyone have an ORHelper that supports vistaDB?

I was led to believe that the ORHelper supported it (see here http://www.vistadb.net/thirdparty.asp and here http://www.vistadb.net/images/wilsonormapper_scrn.jpg)

If anyone has this can I please have a copy?

Its gonna be painful to add this to the ORHelper myself.

Cheers for any input at all.

11/25/2005 3:03:02 AM

I agree that image is not very helpful -- I'm not sure why the folks at VistaDB felt it necessary to concoct it, but I can assure you that they themselves are the sole source of it.

First, let's discuss the ORMapper: As I explained to them, the WilsonORMapper supports all databases that support ANSI Sql, along with being configurable for a new non-standard options like paging, identity, and delimiters. I do have a few things hard-coded for MS Sql, Access, and Oracle, but that is because they are the non-standard databases -- not because they are any more supported. By not hard-coding providers and options for other databases the ORMapper is the most flexible it can be. This allows more databases to be used with my ORMapper than any other, and for example with VistaDB it also means that even a brand new database was automatically supported. Even for existing popular databases this has proven to be very important -- for instance, MySql has multiple possible providers and is very configurable which sometimes means hard-coded options is a very bad idea.

Now let's discuss the ORHelper: In ALL cases the ORHelper uses OleDb to query the table and column information in a single standard format. That's right -- unlike the ORMapper, the ORHelper never uses native .NET providers -- not even for MS Sql and Oracle (again, let me stress that the ORMapper DOES use native .NET providers). Selecting MS Sql, Access, or Oracle in the ORHelper merely means that your connection string is modified to work with OleDb. Why? Because the ORHelper is just a simple ugly quick start tool that I've never pretended to invest a lot of time into, so having a single method to get the table and column info was highly desireable. As I pointed out to the folks at VistaDB, there is also no special treatment of MySql or any of the other databases that are generically supported.

So what does this mean for VistaDB? One option is to build your database in Access or MS Sql, use the ORHelper, and then use VistaDB's migration wizard. Note that I actually do this all the time myself even for MS Sql -- I create an Access database and then later upsize it to MS Sql -- easily doable with an ORMapper. Another option would be to use an OleDb driver, although it looks like VistaDB is still working on that, so that may not be an option. My other recommendation is to modify the CodeSmith templates -- this would not only give you VistaDB support easier than modifying the ORHelper, but it would also allow you to easily customize the code generation of your entities.

Thanks, Paul Wilson