Adding additional entities to a Entity Framework backed Domain Service

Question

We're investigating using RIA Services (July 09 Preview) to expose parts of an existing EF model. We've added a Domain Service class to our web application and specified the EF model to use and selected a few of the entities we wish to make available via the domain service (some have editing enabled, most do not).

We build and everything is great, but if we want to add an additional entity to the domain service how do we do that. Is it a case of delete your current class and re-add and this hole will be plugged when RIA Services hits RTM?

Answer 1

You can just add the code for the new entities... just add the right methods, query, and depending on which operations you need, insert, update, delete and custom ones.

Yoiu shouldn't have to delete your current class, which theoretically contains a bunch of interesting app logic (I'd imagine) just because you want to add an entity.

Answer 2

I agree, that's annoying to type in all that manually every time the DB changes. What i end up doing is creating a new temporary domain service classes (and metadata) and cut&pasting the code into the existing domain service and then removing the temp service from the project.

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Another option can be (didn't try it) to make the generated file a partial class, put all the new queries into a separate file and every time the DB Schema changes just blow away the generated file and recreate it using the wizard. Just a thought