Is it possible to use ASP.NET Dynamic Data and SubSonic 3?

Question

Is it possible to use ASP.NET Dynamic Data with SubSonic 3 in-place of Linq to SQL classes or the Entity Framework? MetaModel.RegisterContext() throws an exception if you use the context class that SubSonic generates. I thought I remembered coming across a SubSonic/Dynamic Data example back before SubSonic 3 was released but I can't find it now. Has anyone been able to get this to work?

Answer 1

I just got Subsonic 3.0.0.4 ActiveRecord working last night in Visual Studio 2010 with my SQLite database after a little bit of work and I've tried to document the steps taken here for your benefit.

Start by adding a New Item -> WCF Data Service to the project you're using to host your webapp/webservices then modify it similar to my PinsDataService.svc.cs below:

public class PinsDataService : DataService<PINS.Lib.dbPINSDB>
{
    // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies.
    public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config)
    {
        config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All);
        config.UseVerboseErrors = true;
        config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2;
    }
}

At this point your Dynamic Data Service would probably be working if you matched all the database naming conventions perfectly but I didn't have that kind of luck. In my ActiveRecord.tt template I had to prepend the following two lines before the public partial class declarations:

[DataServiceKey("<#=tbl.PrimaryKey #>")]
[IgnoreProperties("Columns")]
public partial class <#=tbl.ClassName#>: IActiveRecord {

I then added references to System.Data and System.Data.Services.Client followed by the inclusion of using statements for using System.Data.Services and using System.Data.Services.Common at the top of the ActiveRecord.tt template.

The next step was to use the IUpdateable partial class implementation from this blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/aconrad/archive/2008/12/05/developing-an-astoria-data-provider-for-subsonic.aspx and change the public partial class dbPINSDB : IUpdatable to match my subsonic DatabaseName declared in Settings.ttinclude

Then to consume the data in a separate client app/library I started by adding a 'Service Reference' named PinsDataService to the PinsDataService.svc from my client app and went to town:

PinsDataService.dbPINSDB PinsDb = 
 new PinsDataService.dbPINSDB(new Uri("http://localhost:1918/PinsDataService.svc/"));
PinsDataService.Alarm activeAlarm = 
   PinsDb.Alarms.Where(i => i.ID == myAA.Alarm_ID).Take(1).ElementAt(0);

Note how I'm doing a Where query that returns only 1 object but I threw in the Take(1) and then ElementAt(0) because I kept getting errors when I tried to use SingleOrDefault() or First()

Hope this helps--also, I'm already aware that dbPINSDB is a really bad name for my Subsonic Database ;)