This is my current incarnation of how I am going about doing this:
I have a DataContext class that I created by adding a LINQ to SQL class, and droping tables onto the designer. I called the class MyDataContext and put it in a namespace called Linq. My database has a table called Tag, which generated a class, also in the Linq namespace. I changed all the accessors to internal, so they would not be visible outside of the data access layer.
namespace Linq
{
[System.Data.Linq.Mapping.DatabaseAttribute(Name="MyDb")]
internal partial class MyDataContext : System.Data.Linq.DataContext
{
...
}
[Table(Name="dbo.vTag")]
internal partial class Tag
{
....
}
}
I then created a class called DataAccess which is what will be exposed to any application that references the assembly. I also created my own Tag class. The DataAccess class and my new Tag class are in a different namespace called Data to avoid collisions with the generated classes which are in the Linq namespace. I use Linq to Sql to query for an IList of Linq.Tag objects, then I use Linq to generate me a list of Data.Tag objects from the Linq.Tag objects.
I'd like to hear comments on this to see if there's a more performant way to do this, or one that requires less code. I also wasn't too happy with my use of duplicate class names (Tag) so I'm interested to hear any ideas on naming suggestions too.
namespace Data
{
public class DataAaccess
{
public IList<Tag> List_Tags()
{
using (Linq.MyDataContext dal = new Linq.MyDataContext ())
{
IList<Linq.Tag> lstTags = (from c in dal.Tags select c).ToList();
return (from tag in lstTags
select new Data.Tag()
{
ID = tag.ID,
Name = tag.Name,
Parent_ID = tag.Parent_ID
}).ToList();
}
}
}
}