SqlBulkCopy and Entity Framework

Question

My current project consists of 3 standard layers: data, business, and presentation. I would like to use data entities for all my data access needs. Part of the functionality of the app will that it will need to copy all data within a flat file into a database. The file is not so big so I can use SqlBulkCopy. I have found several articles regarding the usage of SqlBulkCopy class in .NET. However, all the articles are using DataTables to move data back and forth.

Is there a way to use data entities along with SqlBulkCopy or will I have to use DataTables?

Answer 1

You can consider a Dataset to be a serialisation of the data entity. However generally speaking I think SqlBulkCopy is a table to table thing, hence the reason or datatables.

Answer 2

SqlBulkCopy uses an IDataReader when calling the WriteToServer method so you should be able to implement IDataReader based on a collection that is IEnumerable. This would allow you to take in an entity set and call SqlBulkCopy using your IDataReader implementation.