New instance in RIA Domain Service

Question

I'm using .NET RIA Services July Preview to communicate between my Silverlight client and my server. On my server I have an ASP.NET project hosting the Silverlight application. In the ASP.NET application I have a Linq-to-Sql DataModel with a table called Hour. I have extended the Hour entity with 3 properties by creating Hour.shared.cs:

public partial class Hour
{
   public string CustomerName { get; set; }
   public string ProjectName { get; set; }
   public string FullProjectName { get { return this.CustomerName + " - " + this.ProjectName; } }
}

In my domainservice I have a get-method called GetHours. Due the design in Linq, I cannot explicit create a new instance of the Hour entity and through the new entity set the values of my new properties:

var query = from hours in this.Context.Hours
            select new Hour()
            {
               HourID = hours.HourID,
               ProjectName = "Hello World"
            };

If I just select hours it works just fine but I need to set the ProjectName and CustomerName some how.

Any ideas about how to get around this?

Answer 1

Trying my answer again, last time SO froze on me.

Probably the easiest way to do this would be using a function:

public Hour PopulateHour(Hour hour)
{
  hour.CompanyName = "xyz";
  hour.ProjectName = "123";
  return hour;
}

Then you can use this in your linq query:

var query = from hour in this.Context.Hours
            select PopulateHour(hour);

One thing that would make this easier would be if you already had the CompanyId and ProjectId as properties in the Hour class.